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WHAT color is the letter A? It’s a query Nicholas Root typically asks the volunteers he has recruited for his analysis. Most give him the identical response. “They are saying the duty is silly and that letters don’t have a color,” says Root.
However they do for folks with letter-colour synaesthesia, wherein letters and phrases are related to explicit colors. That includes Jennifer Mankin, now a synaesthesia researcher herself, who remembers complicated her schoolmates in her teenagers by saying certainly one of them had an orange identify. “It grew to become clear to me, in that second, that my notion of the world was essentially completely different than most different folks,” she says.
Scientists have known about synaesthesia for more than 200 years, however for a lot of that point it has been unclear why some folks mix sensory data – why they affiliate phrases with flavours or sounds with textures, for instance. As of late, there’s a consensus that some types of synaesthesia, significantly letter-colour synaesthesia, are intently tied with studying. The revelation is pushing researchers like Mankin to transcend asking why synaesthesia exists and discover what it reveals about how the mind capabilities.
This work has already proven how tradition influences the best way we study and the way our considering is formed in numerous methods relying on which language we communicate and write. The newest discoveries could show much more important: we now have seen tantalising indicators that many individuals with out synaesthesia unknowingly mix sensory data, which means that what we’re studying concerning the trait would possibly even inform us one thing extra far-reaching about human consciousness.
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