ChromaTherapyLight

Color in Light, Pigment, and Perception

What is Synesthesia & Chromesthesia?

Seeing music as colors. Taste salt and see colors.  Synesthesia is the ability to perceive through your senses information you receive intellectually.

Criteria for Synesthesia [1]

1. The ability must be automatic and involuntary.
2. The images must be specially extended meaning processed outside the body.
3. Variances must be consistent and simple
4. The sensations need to be memorable, even months later
5. Perceptions need to be experiences as real and undeniably true, causing an emotional response in the person experiencing them.
   

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"The colours my daughter 'sees' for each musical note."
Image by Jess, Photo by Andrew Bullock, 2009 [2]

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What is Synesthesia?

"Synesthesia is a condition in which one sense (for example, hearing) is simultaneously perceived as if by one or more additional senses such as sight. Another form of synesthesia joins objects such as letters, shapes, numbers or people's names with a sensory perception such as smell, color or flavor. The word synesthesia comes from two Greek words, syn (together) and aisthesis (perception). Therefore, synesthesia literally means 'joined perception.' "[3]

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History and Research

A Statistical Study of Pseudo-Chromesthesia
and of Mental-Forms
Mary Whiton Calkins
The American Journal of Psychology
Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jul., 1893), pp. 439-464
Published by: University of Illinois Press
DOI: 10.2307/1411912
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1411912
Page Count: 28

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American Synesthesia Association

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Related Topics

Color Blindness

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Footnotes

1. Criteria for Synesthesia, Stuck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel [book] by Jason Padgett and Maureen Ann Seaberg.
   
2. Andrew Bullock, if you would like to be interviewed by ChromaTherapyLight, please contact us.
3. https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/syne.html