![]() ![]() Interest in the phenomenon faded during the 19th Century and synaesthesia wasn’t formally recognised as a neurological condition until the 1980s. However, the first documented synaesthete was Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs, an Austrian physician who wrote about his own experiences with coloured words and music in 1812. Greek philosophers may have been the first to examine the phenomenon in the 17th Century, when they pondered whether colour was a physical property of music. One theory is that synaesthetes’ brains go through less pruning, so they experience interlinked senses throughout life. We are all born with many cross-connections between brain regions, but for most of us, these are pruned during early development. We now know that white matter, which connects different brain regions, is organised differently in synaesthetes’ brains, and they have more grey matter in regions responsible for perception and attention. They displayed activity in visual regions of the brain when sounds were played, a pattern not seen in non-synaesthetes. In the 1990s, sound-colour synaesthetes were blindfolded and put into an fMRI scanner. It is thought that synaesthesia is caused by extra connectivity between sensory regions of the brain, so stimulation of one sense cross-activates the other. There are over 70 types of synaesthesia, which cause associations between different types of sensory input, but what they all have in common is that the associations are involuntary, present from early childhood, and remain consistent throughout life. ![]() The word synaesthesia originates from the Greek words ‘syn’ for union and ‘aesthesis’ for sensation, literally translating to ‘a union of the senses’. For example, a synaesthete might see colours when music plays, or taste flavours when they speak different words. ![]() Synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon where stimulation of one sense triggers experiences in another sense. ![]()
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