NOTE! Spoiler Alert! Do not start reading until you complete the poll above. Don't think too much, your first reaction will do...
Silly question? Not to a group of people called "synaesthetes". This refers to a substantial group of people who synthesize or integrate their senses with various input. For example a certain word can actually create a specific taste for them (lexical-gustatory synaesthete). An aroma can create "shapes, movements and colors (odour-visual/spatial). Or perhaps to see a letter or day of the week as a color (grapheme-colour).
The number of people? Estimated at 4-5% of us. Now to the rest of us this may seem remote, but to these folks it's as real as the vanillan in Seale's Ten is to us.
So WTF should we care?
It took a long time for the now fact of "synaesthesia" to be accepted. Now that it is the scientist want to know how what they have learned may help the rest of us.
The point that these scientists make is not that these people have an odd or special experience, but that we all have such experiences but far less intensely or explicitly. They now want to see what role synaesthesia plays in both child development and perhaps to help people improve their senses and/or recover from a trauma. Think football players, post traumatic symptoms, or concussions. After her first one, Sue Sea actually experienced increased sense acuity!
As an example: the scientist "trained" non-synaesthetes to associate words and letters with certain colors. Without going into detail this training resulted in these subjects having improved recall and word memory. A long term goal is to help aging people recapture, preserve or improve their cognitive abilities, memory and general mental health.
Or better appreciating rum.
Taste Wheels
Let's consider spirits tasting. How many of you use a good aroma/taste wheel? We used to but got out of the habit, especially once we began to feel more experienced and comfortable with our palates. Not to mention our goal to review rums using tastes, aromas and experience common to us all, and trying to capture the rum in single short phrase, eg "the Bananas Foster rum" (1919).
We now realize that along with a reference rum, the wheel needs to come out more. The actual goal of a wheel is not to provide you with specific descriptors, but to remind us to consider categories which - voila! - will turn on our memories and lead US - not the wheel - to identify a descriptor from our own past. A synaesthetic example: the aroma/taste of "leather" creates vivid memories of her grandfather's leather covered antique desk and of course, her dear and beloved grandfather. But back to the scientists...
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http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014 ... al-decline
"Grapheme-colour synaesthesia is one of the most common forms of synaesthesia. Grapheme-colour synaesthetes associate letters, numbers or words including days of the week or months with colours.
Sequence-space synaesthesia is an umbrella term that describes the experience of perceiving ordinal sequences – letters, numbers, days, months – in a spatial arrangement.
Music-colour synaesthesia is a form of the condition in which different musical timbres or notes of the musical scale can spark colour perceptions.
Touch-colour synaesthesia is a form of synaesthesia in which tactile sensations against the skin trigger the perception of colours.
Mirror-touch synaesthesia describes the variety of synaesthesia in which observing someone else being touched is felt as touch.
Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia entails experiencing specific tastes in response to certain words.
Sequence-personality synaesthesia describes the personification of everyday objects or sequences such as letters or numbers."
