Week Two: Synesthesia (Art & Neurological) and Cymatics

I really enjoyed this week’s topic of synesthesia (neurological and in art) and cymatics.  The subjects go hand in hand, and I would say that cymatics are a form of synesthetic art.  Just for the sake of organizing my thoughts, I will go ahead and define these terms.  Synesthesia is the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body, which occurs involuntarily and automatically (This literally means joined sensations).  For example, a person with a synesthesia, called a synesthete, can hear music but also see it and/or feel it.  Also, in other forms of synesthesia, a person can see colors in numbers, letters, and words, or words can have flavors, and flavors can have color.  This is not any type of disorder, but it does mean that the person has certain senses connected that create an effect that is not normal for every person, but is normal for the synesthete.  Now, cymatics is process of visualizing sound, which some synesthetes actually do see sounds.

Synesthetes are more common than I ever knew.  It is reported that it’s possible that synesthesia is common in every 1 in 23 people.  I have never personally known someone with synesthesia, though.  It is possible that they don’t even know that he or she has it because the potency of synesthesia varies greatly from the people who have it.  I thought it was interesting that synesthesia is known to be hereditary, but we still know so little about it that we don’t know how it carries over in the genes especially when it is not the same type of synesthesia that is passed down in the family.

All of this information was new to me, as I had just vaguely heard of people having these types of cognition responses.  The type I had previously heard about was grapheme → color synesthesia, which is when individual letters of the alphabet and numbers are tinged with color, and this is the most common type of synesthesia.  I personally would find it very cool to have different colors associated with words or to be able to see colors when listening to music.  But it would be strange if different sounds and words had a flavor that I could actually taste, and this type of synesthesia is called lexical → gustatory synesthesia.

I find synesthesia fascinating, and I especially synesthesia’s relationship to the arts, with the some non- synesthete artists trying to replicate what a synesthetic experince would be like for an audience and synesthete artists who attempt to either draw, paint, etc. their own personal synesthetic perceptions to create their art.