Synesthesia is a human condition in which stimulation of one sense leads the person to think of or experience another sense. Creative people have long been aware of this. In the 19th century Beaudelaire wrote poems in which smell, sound and color interacted. His friend, Verlaine described the white light of the moon as creating sound in the trees it was lighting. And their pal Rimbaud's poem, "Voyelles" begins:,
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins....
Elsewhere in this blog I have written about how useful it is to teach English vowel pronunciation using the Color Vowel® Chart and System created by Karen Taylor and Shirley Thompson in 1999.
Now, in the 21st century, a number of institutions have turned to the scientific study of crossmodal processing in the human brain. One of these, published in 2019, showed that, not just synesthetes, but the large majority of human beings do map vowel sounds to colors even if they have not been not consciously aware of it. Wow!
This was a a collaborative venture of Radboud University, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and NTR Broadcasting. To read about this research, go to https://neurosciencenews.com/color-vowel-synesthesia-10999/
Even though I'm pretty good at finding what I want via Google, it was darned hard to find this paper. Now that I've subscribed to neurosciencenews.com, though, I've been getting emails about other studies, too.
To be continued...
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