There is a really interesting article on the Scientific American website about synesthesia, where the experiences of different experiences intermingle into a single combined experience. People can taste colours or hear shapes, for example.
New born infants have synesthetic experiences, until they learn to separate their perception of the sensory inputs. Designing experiments to test this hypothesis is difficult, which is why the hypothesis has remained untested for twenty years.
This is what the psychologists did:
“Researchers presented infants and adults with images of repeating shapes (either circles or triangles) on a split-color background: one side was red or blue, and the other side was yellow or green. If the infants had shape-color associations, the scientists hypothesized, the shapes would affect their color preferences. For instance, some infants might look significantly longer at a green background with circles than at the same green background with triangles. Absent synesthesia, no such difference would be visible.
The study confirmed this hunch. Infants who were two and three months old showed significant shape-color associations. By eight months the preference was no longer pronounced, and in adults it was gone altogether.”
Reading Steven Mithen’s work, (see this earlier post) I wondered if it were possible that Neanderthals might be synesthetes. I hinted as much in Flow, where Zana experiences synesthetic blending as she goes into a trance-like state.
