Intense intellectual activity can lead to the fusion of perception from several senses, believes Genrikh Ivanitsky, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor, Scientific Director of the ITEB RAS. Scientists call this synesthesia. Why there are more and more synesthetics.
Unified perception
In 1905, Russian biophysicist, academician Pyotr Lazarev began to study the mechanisms of human perception of the external world. He wrote an article about this "On the mutual influence of the organs of sight and hearing", published several books.
“He showed that synesthesia, when two receptor systems merge, is not a bluff, but a real fact. And he intuitively put forward the postulate that such a union is possible, it is a natural physiological process, "said Genrikh Ivanitsky at the conference" Hippocampus and memory: norm and pathology ", held in June at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Despite his great services, in 1937 Academician Lazarev was accused of pseudoscience and hounded in the press. However, research in this direction continued.
Feelings help memory
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In 1968, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria published the brochure A Little Book of Great Memory. In particular, he described there the phenomenal abilities of the reporter, and later the professional mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky.
The young man was sent to see a psychologist by his supervisor, editor. It turned out that Shereshevsky's memory has no "clear boundaries." He reproduced the memorized series of words over the years.
He was diagnosed with extremely developed synesthesia - the fusion of information from two senses. The sounds of music, voices were colored in his mind with different colors. In total, Shereshevsky possessed several synesthesias, where flows from five senses were combined.
Observations of him allowed Luria to conclude that synesthesia promotes good retention of information in memory.
“What is synesthesia for? It destroys uncertainty,”believes Henrikh Ivanitsky.
He gives the results of an experiment carried out in his laboratory. From six fragments, it was required to assemble two whole figures: a square and a rectangle. Everyone coped with this task in a matter of minutes, not noticing that there were many build options. Painting figures with different colors did not eliminate the ambiguity. And only the addition of one more feature - the drawing of a snake - allowed solving the problem correctly.
According to the professor, each new feature makes memorization easier. The mnemonic techniques are based on this. It also explains why synesthetics have a good memory.
Creativity and synesthesia
Synesthesia is the focus of scientists these days. For example, neuropsychologist Viljanur Ramachandran in the book “The Brain Tells. What makes us human”describes the perception of a synesthetic patient. He saw a colored halo around the face of each person. Alcohol intensified the sensations: the color became more intense and spread all over the face.
This patient was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a special form of autism that makes communication difficult. He could not intuitively read emotions, he had to draw conclusions about them based on the context. Moreover, each emotion had its own color.
There is no consensus on how synesthesia occurs. This can be inherited or result from the body's adaptation to environmental changes.
According to one hypothesis, synesthesia develops when a child gets acquainted with abstract concepts: letters, numbers.
“After the printing industry started producing color primers, the number of synesthetics increased. The letter A is a watermelon. It is painted red. B - banana, painted yellow. Anyone who is genetically predisposed to fusion of receptor systems paints letters in his head. Gradually, this becomes a permanent feature. Moreover, a person does not realize this,”says Henrikh Ivanitsky.
No wonder the most common types of synesthesia are grapheme-color and digital-color.
Test for the detection of digital-color synesthesia. Illustration by RIA Novosti. Alina Polyanina.
“There used to be two percent of synesthetics among people, now there are twelve. It is not clear, due to the fact that the methods of their recognition have improved, or indeed there are more such people,”the professor argues. In an article published in the latest issue of the journal "Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk", he suggests that intellectual work and creativity contribute to an increase in the number of synesthetics. The work of an artist, writer, composer, scientist requires associative thinking based on enumerating many connections between clusters of neurons. If the system of inhibition in the brain is insufficient, the unification of information flows can occur. “For many creative people, with intense mental work, receptor perceptions merge, which creates a bright world of new images in a virtual model of the brain,” he concludes.
Tatiana Pichugina