Synesthesia is a condition that can occur in an individual who can hear colors, see sounds, or appreciate textures when tasting something. A synaesthetic, for example, spontaneously perceives the correspondence between color tones, sound and taste intensity.
For biology, synesthesia is a secondary or associated sensation in which a stimulus that is applied to a certain part of our body is perceived in a different one. Psychology, on the other hand, considers that synesthesia is the sensation in which a perception, typical of a certain sense, is fixed by another sensation that affects another sense.
There are people who can touch an object and notice flavors in their mouth, and others can see colors when they listen to music. It seems incredible, right? But it's true, and maybe you can be one of those synaesthetic people.
The neural center that is responsible for color is an area called V4. Very close to him, they are in specialized areas in numbers and hearing centers. Therefore, synesthesia is due to a transversal activation between the different areas that are activated with the stimuli of the contiguous areas.
In addition, synesthesia has a genetic root, since it is inherited from parents to children. It may be due to a mutation that causes areas of the brain to not be perfectly separated during the development process that takes place during pregnancy.
In some cases, synesthesia can occur if one or more senses are damaged. But it can also be caused by certain types of drugs. Among them, lysergic acid or mescaline. But you should know that in the latter case, the individual's perceptions are not imaginary, they are completely real.
Dr. GTL Sachs was the first specialist to explain the characteristics of this phenomenon, in 1812. Over time it was discovered that synesthesia is more common among those with autism and that even certain types of epilepsy can generate perceptions of this type.
Beyond the psychological level, it is convenient to specify that synesthesia is also a stylistic device that writers use on the literary level to convey a specific emotion to the reader. Synesthesia is a rhetorical figure through which it is possible to mix sensations of different order (taste, visual, auditory and tactile), establish an association between them and produce a concrete effect on the reader.
Synesthesia is a literary device that you can observe in both prose and poetry. Here are different examples of synesthesia: “bitter sadness” (the bitter concept generally refers to the sense of taste), “gray silence” (the sound has no color, so the gray concept is often used for realities materials).
