Synesthetic Reality - Is our notion of reality the only truth? :: Synthesia Research Science Papers

Synesthetic Reality - Is our notion of reality the only truth? "What's first strikes me is the color of someone's voice. [V--] has a crumbly, yellow voice, like a flame with protruding fibers. Sometimes I get so interested in the voice, I can't understand what's being said." --From Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses by Robert E. Cytowic. What would you make of the preceding account? Would you think the speaker was...crazy?...on drugs?...making a play for attention? Would you be skeptical if the speaker told you it was her natural way of perceiving the world? In truth, it is an example of the way in which about one in every 25,000 people observes the world (1). The term (I hesitate to use "scientific term" for reasons I'll discuss further on) given to the condition-- synesthesia--derives from the Greek roots syn, meaning together, and aesthesis, to perceive, and conveys the principle features of the synesthete's perceptual state (2). In synesthetic perception, stimuli activate not just one sense, but several. An oral stimulus isn't a taste alone--it may also be a taste, a shape, a color, a movement (1). For example, a synesthete might explain that the taste of "squid produces a large glob of bright orange foam, about four feet away, directly in front of me" (3). Such joint perceptions are automatic and involuntar y, just as is usual perceptual experience, and, unlike imaginary images or ideas, synesthetic perception is not only vividly real, but "often outside the body, instead of imagined in the mind's eye" (2). Though accounts of synesthetic experience are receiving increased study and documentation, the many in the scientific community remain partially unconvinced, if not wholly dismissive. Lacking sufficient empirical, objective data to depict the synesthetic experience, synesthetes and researchers of the condition have had to combat doubt, disregard, and ridicule in defense of the condition's reality and validity. The question raised by synesthesia then becomes: Why does science discount first-person evidence to such an extent? If a condition has little to no "objective" or empirical "proof," does that mean it can't exist? If researchers can produce no computer read-out, no resonance imaging, no technologically-generated chart, should the scientific community turn up its nose? The existence of synesthesia has been questioned and discussed for nearly 300 years, and it received the most enthusiastic investigation between 1869 and 1930 (12).