Fact of the Day : What is the condition of synaesthesia? (from The Oxford Companion to Consciousness)
synaesthesia- Synaesthetes taste what we taste, hear what we hear, and see what we see, but when they engage in these perceptual acts they also experience something extra. Tastes can be accompanied by feelings of texture, sounds by tastes, and in the most common form of synaesthesia, ordinary black letters and digits induce experiences of colour. As one synaesthete relates ‘I know the letters are black, but I also see a colour above the black letter’. It is these ‘extra’ perceptions that distinguish a synaesthete's perceptual world from our own (see Cytowic 2002 for these and other examples of synaesthesia). Unlike extra perceptions that can be temporarily experienced under the influence of certain drugs (LSD) or under hypnotic suggestion, for people with true, developmental synaesthesia, their synaesthetic experiences have coloured their cognition for as long as they can remember.
The inducers of synaesthetic experiences can be relatively simple (a tone, the letter K), or more complex (the word January). For time–space synaesthetes, July is not only pink, but occupies a discrete location in space (e.g. 45° to the right of midline). For P. D., each month has a different colour, and the months are located in discrete positions that surround her body.
Although synaesthetes can experience a variety of synaesthetic concurrents (taste, touch, sound) colour is by far the most common synaesthetic experience. Synaesthetes describe colours that range from the ordinary (colours that they can match to those on a colour palette) to the extraordinary—colours that they claim never to have seen in the real world (Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001). Intriguingly, for some synaesthetes, colour words like ‘red’ can induce colours different from that referenced by the word (e.g. when shown ‘red’, they experience blue). This so‐called alien colour effect suggests that synaesthetic colours are not simply the result of associative learning (Gray 2005).
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http://www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/fact-of-the-day.html?date=2011-07-25
