 I see things differently than most people. I see colors. I see colors that I can’t describe to other people. I see them with my numbers and letters. Imagine believing something you saw everyone else could too but in reality, less than one percent of the population can see what I see. I was fifteen in my chemistry class and this girl in my lab mentioned she associated genders with her letters. Everyone was so confused and for the first time I’d ever said it aloud, I see colors with my numbers and letters, I thought everyone did too. My classmate proceeded to tell me we had this this really rare condition called synesthesia. For years’ synesthesia, has been this hidden neurological phenomenon but now as a result of relentless research and synesthetes coming forward with their own stories, it has been proven that it exists, and is not always a disadvantage, but it can be advantageous and beneficial for cognitive functioning, learning and memorization. Literature has even incorporated the advantages of synesthesia by allowing it portray the world through a different lens.

 Synesthesia is simple yet complicated, in that it is very much a mystery, some refer to it similar to the concept of magic. It allows people to do think, see, hear, etc. entirely different than the average person. “Synesthesia is an anomalous blending of the senses in which the stimulation of one modality simultaneously produces sensation in a different modality (Palmeri, Blake, and Marois 2002).”  In other words, synesthesia is the neurological phenomenon in which there is an association of one sense subconsciously and involuntarily with another sense or part of the body. Any sense can be paired to synesthesia; some people can see colors when they hear music, or can sense the personality of days, or even seeing a gender for number and letters. Synesthesia is confusing because it’s origin is unknown and there’s not necessarily a link between the people who do have it. The entire realm of synesthesia was once fantasized about back a few hundred years ago.  French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire were fascinated with it and always wrote of synesthetic experiences in their work. Many people view it as this romantic theme that one can experience and perceive the world so differently because of the blending of their senses. 

 Since synesthesia has been so fancied it is often used in literature for emphasis to make a point stronger. Often it is structured as a rhetorical device such as a simile or a metaphor. There are many famous examples that people often overlook as even being a reference or having any association to synesthesia. For example, Othello by William Shakespeare states a very famous concept of jealousy having relation to the color green, “Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on.” This exemplifies synesthesia in how a color becomes associated with a feeling. Another very well-known example is in Langston Hughes’s famous poem, Harlem, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?/ Or fester like a sore-/ And then run?/ Does it stink like rotten meat?/ Or crust and sugar over-/ like a syrupy sweet?/ Maybe it just sags/ like a heavy load.” Hughes is so successful in describing this dream because of the use of synesthesia by having a dream “dry up, fester, crust and sugar over, etc.” Dreams normally aren’t described in those types of terms so it allows there to be another dimension to it making his point much stronger. Literature supports presenting synesthesia in a positive light and proving it to generally be advantageous rather than impairing or debilitating. 

 One of the most impending factors of researching and knowing more and more about synesthesia is that there are so many different types of synesthesia. Since there are anywhere from seventy to one-hundred different types and they are very different and usually don’t relate to each other in the slightest, making it difficult to find similarities. Some synesthesia is mild and barely disrupts the person from living life any differently than an average person while some make everyday life very difficult. One of the most strange and difficult to comprehend is mirror-touch synesthesia. “(MTS) or Mirror-Touch Synesthesia refers to an experience in which observing touch to another person evokes tactile experiences on the observer’s own body (Banissy, 2013).” There are many cases where people have come forward with this claiming that they can feel the exact pain that others with stain on their own body. Another very rare case is Lexical-Gustatory Synesthesia which essentially is where people have associations between words and tastes (Ramachandra, 2016); so basically, when someone says a particular word they have an associated taste, even if there is absolutely no correlation between the words or the tastes. Chromesthesia or sound-to-color synesthesia is a type of synesthesia in which sounds can automatically and involuntarily evoke a person to experience a color. Another very strange one would be Personification Synesthesia which is where a person associates a gender or an identity to an inanimate object such as a letter, number, weekday, etc. While there are so many more that would only continue to stretch your imagination, there is only one common ground that holds all of these types of synesthesia together and that is that it is an, “atypical merging of sensory and/or cognitive functions” (Jewanski et al., 2011)

 Aside from all of these outrageous types of synesthesia there are others that are still strange to the average mind but do not necessarily pose impeding harm to oneself such as Mirror-Touch Synesthesia. Color-Grapheme Synesthesia is a condition where one experiences colors with their numbers and letters. It is involuntary, consistent, and memorable. Speaking from personal experience it seems unfathomable to the average person that while they see black font I see it colored to my own personal color palette. That being stated even if fonts are colored I can still also see the colors that are associated with the individual letters and numbers based off my own personal synesthesia. The initial question I am consistently asked upon explain the type of synesthesia I have is what color is A, what color is 5, what colors make up my name? Unfortunately, this is not always an easy answer to give for a multitude of reasons. The first being that for a very few of mine they have two different colors associated with them so to answer the question of what letter is H; it depends on the context because it can either be lilac or red, it changes based on the words it is used within. Another impending issue with answering the basic questions is that I have a select number of letters and one number that I can see the color and understand it mentally in my mind but it doesn’t exist to where I could describe it to someone who can’t also see it. For example, the color I experience with my number nine I literally can’t explain the color because other people wouldn’t understand. Essentially, I can see colors beyond the initial color spectrum that most people see, and those colors that are beyond it I struggle to even try to explain it. People for a very long time have been trying to rationalize color-grapheme synesthesia by attempting to find this common pattern or color experience between all synesthetes but truthfully the way in which a synesthete creates their color palette is innate or based off of early childhood influences. 

 A study was conducted by neuroscientist Jamie Ward and other colleagues in which subjects volunteered to participate if they had color-grapheme synesthesia and were fluent in sign language or were not fluent in sign language. “Of those that knew sign language four did associate colors with the signed letters – and the color was the same as the shade they saw for the written version of each letter” (Hamzelou 2016). This study was intended to test whether it applies not only to a multitude of written languages but potentially with hand signs as well. There were some subjects who indeed saw colors the same shade written and signed. Most of the people who knew sign language had learned it for an alternate reason than hearing impairment which implies that synesthesia was adapted to this new form of language. “It tells us that synesthesia is not fixed in early life – exposure can bring new synesthesia” (Hamzelou).

 While people everywhere are still in disbelief that it is humanly possible to have synesthesia, especially some of the wilder ones, there have been studies done to test if it is only innately possible. For the most part people who know of this condition or believe in it tend to think synesthesia is obviously innate and that it couldn’t possibly be taught to someone who doesn’t have it. However, in this nine-week course, some of the fourteen participants eventually reported having occasional synesthesia and seeing the particular hues and colors on road ways or on other things since taking the course. One participant said, “The color immediately pops into my head.” This helps to support the idea that synesthesia is in fact related to innateness because it is something that really can’t be forced it just has to happen. The course met daily for a half-hour sessions to teach them 13-letter-color associations, while progressing the training drills to get much for challenging. Nine of the fourteen volunteers reported seeing colored letters while reading basic black text. Even by week five some volunteers were having daily synesthetic experiences. However, people did report it to slowly stop occurring as a result of the course being complete (Wilson, 2014). Overall, this test proved and solidified that color-grapheme synesthesia can be taught to individuals to a certain extent but it will more than likely not stick with them much past the training since synesthesia is based off the fact that it is innate and hard-wired to one’s brain. 

 Synesthesia can typically enhance ones’ experiences of day to day life there are downsides to the condition in and of itself that people often overlook. It is crazy to think I personally can’t tell you the last time I didn’t see colors with my numbers or letters and that also aligns closely with many synesthetes as well. However, upon coming out and trying to tell family or friends about their condition many synesthetes get judged or thought to be insane. It allows peers to ridicule synesthetes and make them feel alienated for their extraordinary abilities. In reference to color-grapheme synesthesia there is a definite disadvantage to certain letters or numbers because of personal color preferences and it may cause one to stray from even certain social relations as a result of that. There are also many stereotypes that refer to synesthetes as “inherently creative and artistic due to their synthetic gifts; that synesthetes are left-handed; and that they are bad at math” (Synesthi and Swaner, 2014). Unfortunately, the last of the three stereotypes is too often the truest, mainly depending on the type of synesthesia one has. For example, someone with OLP synesthesia often experiences levels of anxiety due to a number being ‘mean’ or ‘nice’ causing them to not want to continue with their work. Additionally, people with color-grapheme synesthesia can often struggle with math because while they know 2 + 4 = 6, yellow plus orange doesn’t equal purple. Another impairing factor for synesthesia is that someone who has sound-color synesthesia can have induced synesthesia in a situation such as a fire alarm to the point to where they can’t even see anything in their visual spectrum. The last disadvantage is that when someone gets sick or is depressed it is very possible that their synesthesia fluctuates with it as well. For instance, this study was done by using two grapheme-colour synaesthetes and recorded their synaesthetic colours in addition to their mood and depression states. Through the testing it was discovered that the luminance of their syaesthetic colours was lessened if their mood was also down. This demonstrates congruence between the brain and the visual cortex’s ability to see what one is essentially feeling which is more times than not a very bad occurrence. It ultimately can leave a depressed person feeling even more depressed because all of their once more vibrant colors are now dimmed (Kay 2015). 

 There has been this overarching perceived notion or misconception that synesthesia is handicapping or impairing to people. Synesthesia appears to be this mysterious alter viewpoint certain people have that allows them to essentially perceive life differently than most; and yet it is stigmatized by people. In past times, it used to be considered a romantic and sexually appealing ability to feel and perceive so much but now people confuse it as this impairment. Unfortunately, all it takes is a few individuals to initiate a misconception and it broadcasts out as this detrimental neurological condition. However, while not everything is always perfect there are so many benefits to this that support why synesthesia may not be entirely flawless its’ pros outweigh the cons by a very large margin. Primarily the argument stems from whether or not it is better to have synesthesia or to not have it. In reference to color-grapheme synesthesia it has been tested to see whether or not there truly are advantages by using a pop-out method. The idea is based around the fact that there synesthetes unusual conscious experiences may in fact improve their cognitive ability as an individual. “Such superior performance would imply that synaesthetes have (perhaps fundamentally) different cognitive processes from the general population. One of the most widely cited findings, including in the popular media and among synaesthete forums such as the Synesthesia List is that synaesthetic colours cause shapes to “pop- out” in the Embedded Figures Task” (Rich 2013). 

Synesthesia despite some misconceptions, is a neurological condition that does in fact exist as well as beneficially help individuals in regard to cognitive functioning, learning, and memorization. Color-grapheme synesthesia is highly successful in allowing individuals to memorize certain words or patterns due to the color they experience with it. While it is a confusing concept to people who have never heard of the phenomenon, it is actually very fascinating to learn about especially with new and upcoming research finding more links to why some but not all people have the condition.
