People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.
synesthesia In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme -> color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities.
- In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be “farther away” than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise).
- Yet another recently identified type, visual motion -> sound synesthesia, involves hearing sounds in response to visual motion and flicker.
Over 60 types of synesthesia have been reported by people, but only a fraction has been evaluated by scientific research. Even within one type, synesthetic perceptions vary in intensity and people vary in awareness of their synesthetic perceptions.
- It is estimated that synesthesia could possibly be as prevalent as 1 in 23 persons across its range of variants synesthesia.
- Synesthesia runs strongly in families, but the precise mode of inheritance has yet to be ascertained.
- Adventitious synesthesia involving drugs or stroke (but not blindness or deafness) synesthesia apparently only involves sensory linking’s such as sound hearing.
