Faith On The Line - Stress, Stress Go Away Vol 18 | Page 15

causes the synesthete to not only hear
a symphony, but to also experience an
automatic light show accompanying it.
Lexical-sustatory synesthesia is quite
fascinating as it allows the synesthete to
associate taste with spoken language so
that words can literally leave a bad taste
in your mouth.
Any two senses can be paired
together. This only expands the potential
for enjoyment, as the person can now
experience not one, but two dimensions
of sensation simultaneously. In fact,
some synesthetes look for not only good
taste combinations when shopping for
groceries, but also color combinations
produced by these foods.
This condition is very rare and some
have estimated that no more than 100
synesthetes are alive today, though the
numbers vary.
However, if this
is hardwired
into every
human brain,
as researchers
are beginning
to conclude,
perhaps this
means we all
have some perception of this “6th sense”
on some level, remote as it may be.
In fact, many of our idiomatic expressions suggest we have. Have you ever
heard someone describe a color as
“loud?” Or have you ever heard music
or tonality described as “dark,” “light,” or
even “round?” When it is extremely cold,
we say it is “bitterly cold.” We often
use phrases that reflect
a combination

Any two senses
can be paired
together.

or “crossover” of two senses.
Haven’t you ever tasted
food that had a “sharp”
flavor? “Sharp” is a feel
word, while “flavor” is a
taste word. We reflect in
our language and expressions that we do have some
ability to sense in multiple
dimensions. And the list
goes on.
But it goes deeper than
that. It turns out that these
aren’t just random mix-ups
of the senses. In fact, often,
the synesthetes agree on colors of letters, or tastes of sounds,
indicating a possible pattern (Lehrer, “Blue Monday,
Green Thursday”).
Jonah Lehrer sought out to find the cause behind this. His
research found that these sensory connections are based on
conceptual contexts.
For example, one subject, when trying to recall the word
“Castanets,” before she had actually found her word, experienced
“Tasting tuna fish as she grappled for the word” (Lehrer). It was
later “confirmed that these were the tastes [she] normally associated” with this word.
And the same experiment was successfully replicated, indicating that it was not the actual word that sparked the taste, but the
very concept alone. And often these sensory perceptions were
common across the board with synesthetes, and not random. He
found “the letter o, for example, is very often white; a is usually
some shade of red, b is blue or brown, while q and j are often
purple or pink” (Lehrer).
Another find was that often, words taste like things whose
nam