Your Daily (okay not really) Psychology Lesson

The stuff I'm learning about in psych right now has turned out to be really interesting, and I felt the need to share it with whoever reads my ramblings. So, just to set it up, the chapters we're doing right now deal with Neuroscience and the like. Which means, the brain and all it's inner workings.

One thing I found really neat while reading about Sensation and Perception is the, I guess you could call it, disease synesthesia. Synesthetes see or hear the world a little differently than we do. I don't want to call it a disease or say that those who experience it "suffer" from it. In fact, I think it's a really interesting way to view the world. These people can experience a variety of different results. It is believed to be caused by a different "wiring" of the brain, but scientists don't know for sure. They think that the different sensory areas of the brain can "cross-activate" on another and allow for more than one sense to be activated by a certain event. You're probably asking what exactly this all means. Basically, synesthetes may experience the ability to see letters in different colors. For them, every letter has a specific color assigned to them, and the ability to see these colors happens instantaneously. So, when they look at a page with black type on it (or anything with letters) instead of it being a page of black and white they see a myriad of colors. Even before they start reading and recognize what letters are depicted on the page. Now, not all synesthetes experience this. Some see colors when they hear music. The note C# may be blue, and a C natural green. This one is one of the weirder ones to me, but jazz musician Duke Ellington experiences this.

"I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band and it's one color. I hear the same note played by someone else and it's a different color. when I hear sustained musical tones, I see just about the same colors that you do, but I see them in textures."--Duke Ellington

Some people even have textures associated with letters, or they get a taste in their mouth when different words are said. Really there are a lot possibilities with this. Basically anyway you can combine two senses. This may seem weird to you, and I'll admit it's kind of hard to believe. Especially when you're so used to things not being that way. Scientists originally thought it didn't exist, but more proof is coming up that it does. Scientists have done brain scans to see what areas of the brain are active when participants participate in activities they claim result in multiple senses.

This has to be one of the most interesting things I've learned this semester.