The Colors of the Alphabet
Imagine that you could taste sounds. If you were lucky, your name would be delicious—every time someone said it you might taste that one fruit smoothie you love or a fresh-baked cookie. Each word would be like sampling a new flavor, for better or worse. This is a form of synesthesia, a condition in which one sense activates a separate sense. Color-grapheme synesthesia seems more believable to most people. Due to this condition, about 5% of the world’s population sees numbers and letters as inherently colored, even if they are printed in black. This can actually improve performance on some tasks, such as a visual search. The left half of the picture below shows the vision of a normal individual; the right half shows that of an individual with synesthesia. As you can see, it is much easier to find the 2’s for an individual with synesthesia.
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