Chapter 7: Synesthesia

When I took Introduction to Psychology a couple years ago, I had to write a paper on a disorder of choosing. I remembered briefly touching upon synesthesia in lecture and how interested I was. I wrote my paper on this amazing and complex disorder. What makes this disorder so unique is how it not only affects the person psychologically, but neurologically as well. Synesthesia is a neurological disorder in which sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color. Maturation of the brain can affect an infant’s ability to differentiate emotions. This can often lead to complications resulting in disorders such as synesthesia. Long dismissed as a product of overactive imaginations or a sign of mental illness, synesthesia has grudgingly come to be accepted by scientists in recent years as an actual phenomenon with a real neurological basis. Some researchers now believe it may yield valuable clues to how the brain is organized and how perception works. The cause remains a mystery, however. According to one idea, irregular sprouting of new neural connections within the brain leads to a breakdown of the boundaries that normally exist between the senses. In this view, synesthesia is the collective chatter of sensory neighbors once confined to isolation.