Welcome to brain stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff, it's Christian Saker. Have you ever heard a color or smelled a sound? If so, don't worry. You are not alone. Instead, you're part of a group I consider superpowered. You have synastasia, or you've done some crazy drugs, and maybe that's a different episode. But when people with synastasia experience input from one sense, it results in the experience of another sense.
So if you're a synisty, like author Vladimir Nabokov, you would associate letters with colors, grapheme color synastasia, that's what it's called. And there are different types of synastasia. Napakov called his color hearing. This grapheme color stuff is the most common type, but cinnastasia can occur between just about any combination of senses or cognitive pathways, and not every everyone will experience the same type of cynist asia the
same way. So while the soft ah sound always seems like fire engine red to one sinistete, it maybe cobalt blue for others. Some people with this condition see music, which sounds kind of beautiful when you think about it. There are less common types, such as lexical gustatory cynast asia. People with this condition taste certain flavors, dishes, or entire meals based on a picture, word, or sound. Smells could
have colors and shapes to the list goes on. There's mirror touch cynist asia, ordinal linguistic personification, and number form where a person sees numbers as a distinct map. So this is all fascinating, but how do people get it? Researchers are still working on that one, but they believe the condition tends to be somewhat inherited or genetic, as about of sinistets have a close relative with cynast asia. Most sinistets recall having the condition for as long as
they can remember. It might sound like people have made pneumonic connections with sounds, colors are so on, but research shows it is a genuine sensory phenomenon rather than a memory exercise. For example, if we drew the number five all over a piece of paper scattered with a few two's forming a triangle, most people would have a hard time seeing it. They would have to look closely to search for the twos and then slowly construct the shape.
But a grapheme color sinistete can see this triangle almost instantly. Researchers think that cinnast asia is a kind of cross wiring in the brain. In graphine color synistets, seeing a number stimulates your grapheme region and the area of your visual cortex that responds to color stimuli. One theory is that there are increased neural connections in the brain of cynistats that could have been the result of less neural pruning.
That's what they call it neural pruning, while in utero, even cooler is that there might be actual anatomical differences in the brains of cinistat's, like increased white and gray matter in their brains. One bit of sad news for all the non sinnistats out there. Although one study did find that some exposure to color letters built up their association, the effect didn't last, so people can't just catch synaesthesia. But hey, it's not like all the cynistats have a
great time. It can be uncomfortable to see a number in the wrong color, and one lexical gustatory synistats said that if a certain name doesn't taste right to him, he has a hard time liking the person it's attached to and it's time to talk about drugs. Don't act like you didn't know this was coming. Hallucinogens might be one way that synaesthesia can be manufactured. Several drugs can produce vivid cynist asia in non sinistats, which might be
a key to understanding the condition. One researcher has positive that in non sinistats, information in a multisensory area travels back easily to its single sense area, but in sinistats it gets a bit mixed up along the way. Hallucinogens may temporarily alter the user's neurochemistry, confusing those existing connections. I mean, let's face it, going to a concert might
be pretty amazing for people with visually associated synesthesia. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.