"The most common form of synaesthesia is colored letters and numbers. That is, joining color to integers. That accounts for about two-thirds of cases. The next big group would be sight and sound synaesthesia, or what is called colored hearing. In this, voices, music, environmental sounds will make people see colored photisms—these are shapes that arise, they change and metamorphose a little bit and fade away.
Synaesthesia isn’t something that you do, it is something that happens to you.
...there is a continuum from synaesthesia to metaphor to language...a lot of people now believe that metaphor is an emergent property of mind... That continuum suggests that synaesthesia is not a high-level, abstract, linguistically-based metaphor—that’s a loud tie, she’s a sweet person, etc—but it is more at the perceptual end of the continuum. And so if it was not for synaesthesia, we probably would not have language."
Posted by Cieciel at July 27, 2005 09:28 PM