This study examines the principles underlying ordinal linguistic personification (OLP): the involuntary and automatic tendency in certain individuals to attribute animate-like qualities such as personality and gender to sequential linguistic units (e.g., letters, numerals, days, months). This article aims to provide four types of evidence that OLP constitutes a form of synesthesia and is likely...

Synesthesia is a condition where presentation of one perceptual class consistently evokes additional experiences in different perceptual categories. Synesthesia is widely considered a congenital condition, although an alternative view is that it is underpinned by repeated exposure to combined perceptual features at key developmental stages. Here we explore the potential for repeated associative...

Synesthesia is an involuntary experience in which stimulation of one sensory modality triggers additional, atypical sensory experiences. Strong multisensory processes are present in the general population, but the relationship between these 'normal' sensory interactions and synesthesia is currently unknown. Neuroimaging research suggests that some forms of synesthesia are caused by enhanced cro...

Synesthesia is a fairly common condition in which individuals experience atypical responses (such as color experiences) in association with certain types of stimuli (such as non-colored letters). Although synesthesia has been described for centuries, only very recently has there been an explosive growth of systematic scientific examinations of this condition. In this article, we review and crit...

There is increasing evidence from case reports that synesthesia is more common in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). Further, genes related to synesthesia have also been found to be linked to ASC and, similar to synaesthetes, individuals with ASC show altered brain connectivity and unusual brain activation during sensory processing. However, up to now a systematic investigation ...

What is the influence of music on brain? And in what cases can this cause dysfunctioning? Among different examples analyzed by Oliver Sacks, one particularly significant: phenomenon synesthesia. Synesthesia connected to having an extra that associates kinds sensory information, music, and color. It sometimes transform hearing as a painful experience, transforming it into pure literal meaning – ...

On Gregg Rosenberg’s (2004) view, synesthesia illustrates how phenomenal properties can vary independently of representational properties. I explain how the representationalist can answer his arguments. The belief that synesthesia poses a serious problem for representationalism derives, I argue, from misconceptions about representationalism. Rosenberg’s discussion of synesthesia and representat...

Grapheme-color synesthetes perceive color when reading letters or digits. We investigated oscillatory brain signals of synesthetes vs. controls using magnetoencephalography. Brain oscillations specifically in the alpha band (∼10Hz) have two interesting features: alpha has been linked to inhibitory processes and can act as a marker for attention. The possible role of reduced inhibition as an und...

Synesthesia, the conscious, idiosyncratic, repeatable, and involuntary sensation of one sensory modality in response to another, is a condition that has puzzled both researchers and philosophers for centuries. Much time has been spent proving the condition's existence as well as investigating its etiology, but what can be learned from synesthesia remains a poorly discussed topic. Here, synaesth...

2 Synesthesia – the mental mixture of real and illusory sensory experiences – is incredibly fascinating to read or hear about but frustratingly complex to study. Those of us who are not synesthetes are spellbound by the accounts of those who are, but at the same time we are mystified by why these mixtures would occur. As the chapters in this volume document, scientific investigation of synesthe...