how to develop synesthesia

Training synaesthesia: How to see things differently in half-an-hour a day | NeuroBanterYes, you can teach yourself the synesthesia (And here is why you should)Berit Brogaard has had synesthesia, a neurological condition in which the different senses are combined in unusual ways, as long as she can remember. We often think of synesthesia as "see" sounds in different colors (also known as chrometic). But Brogaard experiences a more infrequent form of the condition, in which fearful thoughts cause an image of a creepy landscape to appear before his eyes. "The synthetic images induced by fear seem like a landscape that is projected into the world around 20 or 30 centimeters of my eyes," writes Brogaard in . "When fear is stronger, the images are extremely vivid." Now professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Miami, Brogaard has studied many cases of synesthesia and other cognitive and perceptive skills unusual in the . As Brogaard and other scientists have observed, synesthesia can lead to remarkable cognitive skills, including enhanced creativity and memory. Famous synthesis Daniel Tammet, who sees numbers and words in shapes and colors, used this gift to establish a European record, reciting the first of memory. Brogaard knows well how synesthesia can be a blessing and a curse. As a child, she was distressed by the image of recurring fear, which she describes as "blue green with wrinkled mountain peaks" and her parents were worried that she had hallucinations. In high school, Brogaard finally discovered what was happening to him when he met the term sinesthesia while investigating a project on color science. In adulthood, Brogaard's synesthesia really saved her life. One day, he was walking along a path in the Australian desert when the image shone in front of his eyes. Looking beyond, he saw that he was about to step on a poisonous snake, although his brain had not yet consciously recorded the threat. If it weren't for the unusual warning system in your brain, that day might have been your last. But this unusual skill is not limited to those who were born with it. HuffPost Science spoke to Brogaard about how we can learn synesthesia and why it's a good idea. You have a very rare form of synesthesia. What forms does the condition take most commonly? Synesthesia is basically when you have a sense that combines with another sense in an unusual way, or an aspect of a sense that combines with another aspect of a sense in a very unusual way. The most common form is when people see letters and numbers that are printed in black or colors - both are visual, but they are two things that do not normally combine. Another common way is the sound of colors, in which people listen to sounds as colors. There are two main types of synesthesia. One is when the image or color is projected in front of you in the visual field, and that is called projective synesthesia, and another type is when people simply have it illuminated in their minds, and we call associative synesthesia. The mechanisms underlying these two types of synesthesia are different. In projective synesthesia, it is an unusual connection between two areas in the visual part of the brain, and in associative synesthesia, it is an unusual feedback that goes from the upper part of the brain to the lower part of the brain. In your laboratory, you have studied many cases of people who develop synesthesia after experiencing accidents or brain injuries. How's this happening? It is rare for brain injuries to lead to synesthesia, but we have seen cases in which people develop extraordinary talents, including synesthesia. In such cases, you damage your brain in a very specific area, collecting the area with neurotransmitters. Those chemicals are sitting inside the neurons, and when the neurons are damaged, all chemicals are released immediately. Many of those chemicals are exciting the brain, and when you have that emotion of the brain, you tend to have extra fast or extraordinary connections. Sometimes, if that is elevated for a time (perhaps a month), we have found that the brain can actually make new connections, and areas can connect to other parts of the brain that are not normally connected to. Synesthesia develops like this. You argue in the book that, to some extent, anyone can perfect this ability. What are some tricks to learn synesthesia? It depends on what you want to learn. It's really just associating two things in one category. You choose a category and start associating things in that category, which could be sound, and things in the other category, which could be colors. So once you start associating those things, you're building new ways. Sometimes when people develop these synthetic connections, for example between sound and color, they can sometimes develop connections in other areas that have nothing to do with sound and color. The brain almost automatically starts associating other things with colors also because it is used to make those associations. The same happens when people train their brains to associate colored numbers. Initially, that might not seem very useful, but what happens is that it becomes easy or almost automatic for them to associate colors with other things. And why would we want to do that? The thing is, you remember colors much better than you remember many other things - emotions and colors are some of the things we best remember. If you can associate things with colors or emotions, your memories will get better. So, sometimes you develop associations to things that are specific to what you want to do, and sometimes you just choose something you find intriguing. You will see the overall improvement in your performance with memory and sometimes also creativity. CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated that Daniel Tammet established a world record to memorize Pi, when he actually established a European record. History has been updated. More:

InternationalMental HealthPersonality Personal GrowthRelations Family LifeNeed help? Recently diagnosed? Talk to someoneCurrent So you're not a "10" anyway. But you're probably quite spectacular somehow, and definitely good enough in most areas of life. If there ever was a time to stop beating yourself up as a human being, it is now. Recent newsReadsTrending TopicsSearch Find a therapist Get helpInternational members Get help Mental health Personal growthRelations Family lifeNeed help? Recently diagnosed? Talk to someoneMagazine So you're not a "10" anyway. But you're probably quite spectacular somehow, and definitely good enough in most areas of life. If there ever was a time to stop beating yourself up as a human being, it is now. TodayNewsEssential ReadsTrending Topics Verified by Psychology TodayKristian Marlow Learn to be a synthesize New research points to memory as a cause for this fascinating condition Posted Feb 05, 2013 BASICS is a condition in which the sensory input of a cognitive flux results in the experience of another unstimulated cognitive flow. The most common forms of synesthesia include graphome and weekly synesthesia. In the synesthesia of grafome-color, seeing or thinking of a letter or number written in black ink induces the experience of a certain color. Weekly color synthesizers experience a particular color associated with days of the week. For example, Monday could be brown, red Tuesday and green Wednesday. How is synesthesia distinguished from other types of learned associations? This starts to become a difficult question. Genuine synesthesia is thought to exhibit idiosyncratic reliability and automation, test-retest. For example, in the synesthesia of grafome-color, it seems that the colors are assigned to letters arbitrarily (idiosyncrasy). But once these colors are assigned, the "married" to the graphemes, that is, the associations of colors remain stable with the time (fiability of the test) and the sinestetet of color grafome cannot help to see the color associated when thinking of the letter (automatic). The extent to which idiosyncratic synesthesia has been the subject of much debate. Graph-color associations may be learned during . For example, some authors have suggested that grafome-color associations often match the colors of the alphabetic refrigerator magnets found in the homes of many children. Many researchers have responded that the evidence is only anecdote and therefore does not support the theory that these associations can be learned. However, one provides the proponents of evidence of a model have been looking for. The researchers examined the associations of 11 grafima syntheses that reported growing with the same Fisher-Price fridge magnets. Using a standardized synesthesia battery that measures differences in the color associations, the team found an impressive similarity of the colored associations of letters between the synestetes and almost all the colored associations match the colors of the Fisher-Price fridge magnets. This is an amazing result! The lowest matches among the 11 subjects were 14 letters. The possibility of 11 syntheses choosing the same color for 14 of 26 alphabet letters is less than 1 in billion! Such a striking result suggests that memory plays a crucial role in grafome-color synesthesia. Color correspondence data of the 11 subjects. According to a recent memory model, which we could call the 'revival model', hippocampus is not a storage space for information but a region of the brain in charge of maintaining connections between networks located in different areas of the brain. The work memory in the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus work in tandem. Hypocampus guides the deposit of proteins in the synapses of neurons in areas that originally processed the information to be remembered. Along with the neighboring hippocampal zones, it also tracks the relative order of events and unites events that belong together. Memory recovery through work memory reactives the original areas of information processing by interaction with the executive hippocampus. In the memory model, synesthesia is the result of an indirect mechanism. The hippocampus at some point would have joined the long-term empowerment (LTP) in the visual areas, as well as in the grafome areas. Exposure to acromatic-stimuli graphite would trigger both the recognition of the graphite and a particular graphite (e.g., the numeral '2') and the memory recovery of the synesthetic colors to the executive areas of the brain. The renewed activity in the color areas that take place for the memory recovery of the synesthetic color information that can be produced simultaneously can lead to a synesthetical color consciousness of the visual color areas. In syntheses in which the graphemes and colors are really attached to the extent that the graphemes literally look like having colors, the hippocampus may be treating the different neural networks in the way that it would normally do with the shape and color that they belong together (e.g. tomato and red). In cases where the graph and color are not closely linked, the hippocampus should treat neuronal networks more as involuntary rapid associations, such as the association between the coup of a party and its enlightened being. I have my doubts about memory, whether explicit or implied, playing such a strong role. I think there are several reasons to think that memory plays at least some role in the synesthesia of grafo-color. See Brogaard B, Marlow K, Rice K. (2013). The LTP model for the fixing of graphite in synesthesia. In Bennet D and Hill C (eds), Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness, MIT Press, next. I agree, but that's not what your headline says. Readers will read "memory as cause" as the cause, the only one, whether without knowing or ignoring the nuance that abounds in this field. I know Nathan and Jonathan were sceptically seen at first, but their conclusion on the impression is persuasive. It also comes with sorters. The characteristics of synesthesia are not as cut and seduced as once, that is safe. A small fraction of graphite syntheses can be generated by printing, an unexpected finding. The PT Blog is a popular place and therefore simplified by definition, and perhaps misinterprets its position, but I would not like to give the newcomers the impression that the syntheses are "just remembering" children's associations. Others have spent a long time refuting that argument. I don't know if you've seen http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-fallible-mind/201208/teach-yourself-synesthesia-i-don-t-think-so Thanks for the PDF. I hope to read it. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that the synestets are only remembering the children's associations, so thank you for clarifying that! However, I do not think it is implausible that you can learn grafome-color associations, at least in the sense that the associative experience is qualitatively identical to the experiences of associated "true" syntheses. If the LTP model is true, then it is possible in principle that the synthetic experience of grafome-color can be learned. Of course, since we still don't know if synesthesia has a structural or functional basis, I'm not suggesting that graphome synesthesia can be self-taught. As for magnets, did the researchers consider that the Fisher-Price employee in charge of assigning colors in the first place could have been a Synesthete? In this case, similarities could insinuate a deeper connection not related to magnets. I can't help but notice that the links of each respondent have a certain flow to them, even those that don't match the magnets. James: Unknown about the alphabet magnet toy inventor. The pairings are typically idiosyncratic rather than modeled in graphite synes. However, they are not totally random. "A" for example tends to be red(ish) and "O" white. While A is certainly red, as M is, and I'm yellow, none of my other colors match. I heard somewhere that S is often blue, as it is for me, but that would not coincide with the FP magnets. I have noticed an association between the general form of a letter or number and color. For example, I, L, 7, J, T and V are all kinds of yellow. The colors B,D,G,O,P,Q,S,5,6,8 are blue/black/purple. But A and M are red, while W is green. Magnetic letters used to irritate me something ferocious. In my twenties, I found a cheap set with the perfect orange F and bought it only for the F, just to get home and find that it also had an orange 4 that made it even better. I dreamed that someday a proper game would be put together. This was years before hearing about synesthesia, but years after I stopped mentioning that my letters had colors. After growing together with my little brother teaching him how to read English correctly and after taking a basic psychiatry class and in my free time learning the foundations of a few languages I decided to dedicate my time to yield free iOS applications that use the experience of grafima synesthesia to help spple around the world. Although there are not many studies done if learning grafima sinethesia is in fact effective or plausible, I want to bridge the doors to new possibilities. I am really hoping that my work will help those who have difficulties or are learning language like ESL or even perhaps other disorders like dyslexia. Maybe someone here wants to use my app as a tool for their experiments in studies. Now what I do know from my own experience is that learning to simlair languages is difficult because of similarity and perhaps by color encoding letters in the grafome experience, which will help add meaning to an object (carators) rather than subtracting the sense that might have been there. If someone is interested, do not hesitate to contact me. (I have checked the notification button to this thread) Hey "Carlos Vega", I am a recent university student who is pursuing a career in the Musical Occupations as Major, and Research Psychology as Minor. In a recent study of the human brain I was doing. I found this post. I am trying to see if there is actually a way to train a human brain to become synesthetic through conditioning, or if it really is something that has to do with a person individual genes and inheritance. Please send me a download/check to your iOS applications by email (InthezoneS19atgmaildotcom) if possible once you read this post to your convenience. Besides, if you're as interested as I am. Some recent studies have shown that after certain incidents in which patients had a head injury where they were beaten in some part of the brain. Neurons and brain cells began to focus on certain areas of impact and some patients developed synthetic traits due to cells and neurons that connect to different parts of the brain that were not connected before the head injury of patients. Synesthesia can be very useful for us in criminal justice and science occupations if the conditioning method is a real case, because if there is in fact a way for the brain to identify individual things with color. Then we can be closer to understanding how to use synesthesia as a kind of brain enhancer to distinguish an effect or element that people use. (ex: things that are weapons are RED, or for scientists things that are the same in a repeat of a test are GREEN) Synesthesia may possibly be the next so-called "evolution" of the human brain if there is real statistical evidence and made of human brain training/acdiction to establish certain elements or results as colors. Or even certain sounds like colors. "It's all in your head! "Post Comment About AuthorsBerit Brogaard, D.M.Sci., Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy and director of the Brogaard Laboratory for Multisensorial Research at the University of Miami. 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