Synesthetic Reality - Is our notion of reality the only truth? :: Synthesia Research Science Papers

synesthetic Reality - Is our nonion of human beings the only truth? Whats first strikes me is the subterfuge of some hotshots voice. V-- has a crumbly, yellow voice, like a flame with protruding fibers. sometimes I get so interested in the voice, I offert agnize whats being said. --From Synesthesia A Union of the Senses by Robert E. Cytowic. What would you make of the antecede account? Would you think the speaker was...crazy?...on drugs?...making a play for attention? Would you be skeptical if the speaker told you it was her natural way of perceiving the world? In truth, it is an model of the way in which about one in every 25,000 lot observes the world (1). The term (I hesitate to use scientific term for reasons Ill hash out further on) given to the condition-- synesthesia--derives from the Greek roots syn, meaning together, and aesthesis, to perceive, and conveys the principle features of the synesthetes perceptual state (2). In synesthetic perception, stimuli activa te not just one sense, but several. An oral stimulus isnt a taste alone--it may likewise be a taste, a shape, a color, a movement (1). For example, a synesthete might explain that the taste of squid produces a large puffiness of bright orange foam, about four feet away, directly in present of me (3). Such joint perceptions are automatic and involuntary, just as is everyday perceptual experience, and, unlike imaginary images or ideas, synesthetic perception is not only vividly real, but often outside the body, instead of imagined in the minds eye (2). Though accounts of synesthetic experience are receiving increased reading and documentation, the many in the scientific community remain partially unconvinced, if not wholly dismissive. Lacking sufficient empirical, objective data to depict the synesthetic experience, synesthetes and researchers of the condition have had to combat doubt, disregard, and ridicule in defense of the conditions reality and validity. The question rai sed by synesthesia then becomes Why does perception discount first-person evidence to such an extent? If a condition has infinitesimal to no objective or empirical proof, does that mean it cant exist? If researchers can produce no computer read-out, no resonance imaging, no technologically-generated chart, should the scientific community turn up its nose? The existence of synesthesia has been questioned and discussed for close to 300 years, and it received the most enthusiastic investigation between 1869 and 1930 (12).