Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Synaesthesia


Karina A.
Period 1
May 20, 2011
Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is a joining together of sensations that are normally experienced separately. Some people with this experience colors when they hear or read words, others may experience tastes, smells, shapes or touches in almost a lot of different combinations. The sensations are automatic and cannot be turned on or off. People are generally born with it and it runs in families. It is not considered to be harmful in any way.
Synaesthesia effects a little over one percent of the population meaning it’s not that very common. However, the most common type of synaesthesia is colored days of the week and less common types of synaesthesia is when you taste shapes, colored music, and odors having taste. Color is the most common experience of synaesthesia.
There are five senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. It could be like vision-hearing, vision-touch, hearing-touch and it goes on. There would be 20 potential types of Synaesthesia: patterns with numbers, letters, words, and names are also get mixed up in this and the list gets greater.
With the alphabet there can be synaesthesia that agree with the same colors they see but every synaesthesia is different but the most common ones are A=red, B=blue, and C=yellow etc. It is possible for a person that has synaesthesia to have more the one type of synaesthesia.
Synaesthesia doesn’t affect your IQ and they do not stand out from other people. Lab reports show that the benefit of having synaesthesia is they have a better memory. There have been reports that they can learn languages better but this could be related to the known benefits to memory.  On the negative side, many people with synaesthetees report having difficulties with numbers and get left/right confused.

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