Some people are able to “see” sounds and numbers in color and even taste them. We are talking about a special way of perceiving reality - synesthesia.
A warm sound, flashy colors, a brilliant idea, a cold look - such images are often found in our speech. However, for some of us, these are not just words.
“Oh, please gentlemen, a little more blue! This is what this tonality demands! It's a deep purple here, not pink! - this is how Franz Liszt once turned to the Weimar Orchestra. The musicians would not be so surprised if they knew that their conductor was a synesthetic.
In the 1920-1940s, the Soviet psychologist Alexander Romanovich Luria studied the phenomenal memory of his compatriot, Solomon Shereshevsky. This person could accurately reproduce a text or a sequence of numbers, having heard them once 10 or even 15 years ago. In the course of experiments, the psychologist found that his patient was able to “see” sounds and numbers “in color”, “touch” them, or feel their “taste”. A tone of 250 Hz with a sound power of 64 db appeared to Shereshevsky as a velvet cord, the villi of which stick out in all directions. The lace is dyed in "soft pink-orange color".
The tone of 2000 Hz and 113 db seemed to him like a fireworks, painted in pink-red, and a rough strip. To the taste, this tone reminded Shereshevsky of spicy pickle. He felt that such a sound could hurt his hand.
The numbers for Shereshevsky looked like this: “5 - complete completeness in the form of a cone, tower, fundamental; 6 is the first for 5, whitish. 8 - innocent, bluish-milky, like lime."
In the 1920s, the phenomenon of synesthesia - "the unity of feelings" - was already known to psychologists; one of the first to describe it was Charles Darwin's cousin, Briton Francis Galton (article in Nature, 1880). His patients were grapheme synesthetes: in their minds numbers lined up in bizarre rows, differing in shape and color.
Many years later, our contemporary, the neurologist Vileyanur Ramachandran, compiled an optical test - a test for synesthesia.
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The subjects are shown the left picture. Among the fives depicted on it, there are twos that form a triangle. As a rule, they do not notice him, however, synesthetes easily identify the figure, since for them all the symbols are brightly colored: some of them seem to have deuces bright red, some blue or green (in the picture on the right).
Professor Ramachandran studied a variety of types of synesthesia, for example, tactile (in this case, touching different materials evokes an emotional response: anxiety, frustration, or, conversely, warmth and relaxation). In the practice of this scientist, there were completely exceptional cases: his student, who had color-number synesthesia, was color blind. The photosensitive cells in his eyes did not react to the red-green parts of the spectrum, but the visual parts of the brain functioned properly, endowing the black and white numbers that the young man was looking at with all kinds of color associations. So he "saw" unfamiliar shades, calling them "unreal" or "Martian".
This kind of evidence sounds strange to people with "normal" perceptions, but neurologists have ways to figure out how synesthetes feel and how, and to check their "readings."
One of them is the observation of galvanic skin response (GSR). When we experience emotions, microscopic sweating increases in our body, and with it the electrical resistance of the skin decreases. These changes can be monitored with an ohmmeter and two passive electrodes attached to the palm. If the synesthete emotionally responds to tactile, sound or color stimuli, this will be confirmed by a high level of GSR.
Diffusion tensor tomography.
Different parts of our brain perform a specific set of functions. A prerequisite for synesthesia can be active interaction between zones responsible for the perception of color and sound, or, for example, the recognition of graphic symbols and the processing of tactile sensations. Diffusion tensor tomography allows you to trace how water molecules spread in the brain tissue, and thus reveal the structural connections between its departments.
Nikolay Kulapov