Can you taste the colour blue? Or what does the flavour 'salty' feel like when you touch it? The ability to think of one sense using another or simply put marry two sensory experiences is synesthesia. It is believed that people who can do that are 'gifted' with this ability. It is also believed such people are mostly right-brain dominant or 'creative' as we know it.
A friend who plans to pursue her Phd on this subject, and I got talking about this. Our hunch is that synesthesia is a possibility for everyone of us...albeit in a subconscious frame of mind.
Why do we make this assumption?
A few years ago illume conducted 45 interviews all across India asking people to think of color through various senses. So we told people to touch, taste, feel, hear and smell colours. And guess what? All of them did !
Here is another piece to the puzzle.
When we were talking about the 'bouba-kiki effect, I just pulled out the paper with the two shapes and asked my 1.5 year old which one is bouba and which one is kiki. She could accurately match the shape to the sound though she has never heard the words before nor seen these shapes.
Children until the age of six pre-dominantly use their right-brain / work subconsciously. They do not analyse information. Even if they did, they would not have a 'judgement' or opinion about it or a frame of reference to compare it with. Which is perhaps why the toddler was able to connect sound & shape so intuitively.
There is just so much the subconscious mind is capable of !
A friend who plans to pursue her Phd on this subject, and I got talking about this. Our hunch is that synesthesia is a possibility for everyone of us...albeit in a subconscious frame of mind.
Why do we make this assumption?
A few years ago illume conducted 45 interviews all across India asking people to think of color through various senses. So we told people to touch, taste, feel, hear and smell colours. And guess what? All of them did !
Here is another piece to the puzzle.
When we were talking about the 'bouba-kiki effect, I just pulled out the paper with the two shapes and asked my 1.5 year old which one is bouba and which one is kiki. She could accurately match the shape to the sound though she has never heard the words before nor seen these shapes.
Children until the age of six pre-dominantly use their right-brain / work subconsciously. They do not analyse information. Even if they did, they would not have a 'judgement' or opinion about it or a frame of reference to compare it with. Which is perhaps why the toddler was able to connect sound & shape so intuitively.
There is just so much the subconscious mind is capable of !
No comments:
Post a Comment