|
|
|
|
|
|
by JadeNB
1391 days ago
|
|
|
> UPDATE. A thought I'd just had: it appears very intuitive that most people do have synesthesia, they're just not consciously aware of it, or, sometimes, don't even know what to call it. The Wikipedia article is vague, but I've always thought of synesthesia as meaning that a stimulus in one "category" provokes a response in another "category"—Wikipedia and your post seem to say the same thing, but with different, and more technical, terminology in place of "category". More to the point, there seems to be some implication that this is a response that "shouldn't" happen; that there is an appropriate response to the stimulus, and that the actual response isn't the appropriate one. But it seems that, if, as you suppose, most people have synesthesia, then the problem is one of definitions. If most people have an inappropriate response, then doesn't that mean that the definition of 'appropriate' is wrong—it's meaningless to say that everyone is abnormal!—so that mass-scale synesthesia must, if it exists, indicate nothing unusual per se about synesthetes, but rather a poor mapping on the part of diagnosticians? |
|
|
The strongly synesthetic associations are 1) always-on*, 2) automatic and immediate, even for novel stimuli**, and 3) consistent over time***
* You can turn your focus away from them, like focusing on a person's voice in a noisy room, but you're still aware of the noise.
** You won't experience the smell of grass looking at a photo of a field, if you've never been to a field before. But many synesthetic associations occur immediately even for new stimuli, especially if it's a simple input like sound. If it's a complex concept like someone's personality or an algorithm, they are initially in flux and solidify as understanding of the concept improves.
*** They can change very slowly over time (years)
The above is more of a personal definition from my experience, and not a clinically accepted one.