synesthesia

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in another, such as perceiving specific colours when hearing musical notes, tasting words, or seeing numbers and letters as having inherent personalities or spatial locations; synesthesia affects an estimated 2–4 percent of the population and tends to run in families, suggesting a genetic component; it is not a disorder but a difference in sensory processing that can enhance creativity, memory, and artistic expression — many prominent artists, musicians, and writers including Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Liszt, and Vladimir Nabokov are believed to have been synesthetes; the most common form is grapheme-colour synesthesia in which letters and numbers are perceived as having specific colours; synesthesia has illuminated fundamental questions in neuroscience about how sensory systems are organised, how they develop, and how cross-modal associations arise in the brain