Written and published on 18 April 2013; revised

Dear Ones,

We think of the physical senses … sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell … as separate … but are they? All are processed by and come to our awareness through the nervous system, which somehow separates them. So we see one thing and hear another thing, for instance. Two separate sensory experiences.

But for some people, sensory paths are intertwined. So, for example, when they think of a letter or a number, they may see a color associated with it. This automatic intertwining of the senses is called synesthesia. There are over 60 kinds of synesthesia. Here is an example of ‘color-graphemic’ synesthesia, where a person automatically associates a letter or number with a color …

Image: The word ‘synesthesia, and the numbers 0 through 9, each with a different color … https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Synesthesia.svg/2000px-Synesthesia.svg.png ..

Other types of synesthesia …

• visualizing the year as a wheel (spatial sequence synesthesia)
• visualizing your lifetime as being on a line (another such instance)
• imagining days of the week or lunar months as personalities (ordinal linguistic personification). Judging from the names of our weekdays, (1) all ancient people must have had this variant.
• smelling an odor when you feel a texture
• feeling an itch when you hear a sound
• seeing colors when you hear a song (that must be quite something! I’m reminded of archangels, who can manifest to us as symphonies of sound or showers of ever-changing light, like the aurora borealis)

Video: “Aurora Time Lapse” by Robert Lyons … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXo-w-S7ai8 ..

It seems to me that writing is a form of synesthesia … a combining of a mental picture, a spoken sound, and a visual shape. So I guess everyone who can read or write could be called a synesthete?

In love, light and joy,
I Am of the Stars

……………………………..
FOOTNOTE

(1) Norse or Teutonic mythology: Sunday – Sun’s day; Monday – Moon’s day; Tuesday – Tiu’s day; Wednesday – Woden’s day; Thursday – Thor’s day; Friday – Freyda’s day; Saturday – Saturn’s day.

…………………..

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

…………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………….

stories, Freyda, Greek gods, Luna, physical senses, Saturn god, Sol, synesthesia, Thor, Tiu, Woden, myths, Norse mythology, Greek mythology, Teutonic mythology,