ABSTRACT
Strongly associating or even experiencing stimuli in one sense modality with, or as being in, another – seeing sounds, hearing colours, and being able to associate abstract terms and names (like the days of the week) with specific colours. Strictly speaking, the term should only refer to circumstances in which this literally occurs beyond the individual’s control. Synaesthesia can occur particularly powerfully during mescalin and LSD intoxication, and is often given mystical significance. It is, however, more mysterious subjectively than neurologically, requiring only some linkage between the neural pathways conveying sensory information. Such linkages occur to some extent quite normally, has anyone ever not thought red was a ‘warm’ colour? In the looser sense, most people are able to make synaesthetic connections, saying the sound of a trumpet is bright red, or that blue reminds them of a muted saxophone. Francis Galton, the Victorian British pioneer psychologist, had great fun with this, distributing questionnaires to acquaintances about the colours of the days of the week (see his Inquiries into Human Faculty, 1883). Virtually all the work on synaesthesia focuses on the sound-visual perception case, but taste and smell instances can also occur, although rarely, touch.
