Evidently, there are specific physical differences at the neurological level separating synesthetes from non-synesthetes.īut precisely how big those differences are is still up for debate. Meanwhile, there’s longstanding evidence that for people with chromesthesia, or sound-to-color synesthesia, the brain will fire up areas typically used for processing color rather than sound when they hear spoken words. “White matter, which connects different regions together, in the brains of people with synesthesia is organized differently,” they explained, “and there is more grey matter in some regions of the brain relating to perception and attention.” “Most theories of synesthesia talk about re-wiring or extra-connections in the brain,” wrote Professors Julia Simner and Jamie Ward from the Synesthesia research group at the University of Sussex. Perhaps knowing what’s behind the phenomenon might provide some clues – though it’s a pretty big question in its own right. “And then you get someone who says, ‘Oh yeah, I do that for weeks, but I also do it for years and decades.’”īut does that really count? And if not, when does “proper” time-space synesthesia start? What causes calendar synesthesia? “And then as you're going along, there might be people who kind of get a sense of where the week is around them,” Rich said. That numbers run from left to right is an idea taught and reinforced to us just about every day of our lives, so it’s not surprising that we would have this association established in our brains – a sort of super-mild version of calendar synesthesia, if you like. That’s true whether or not you have synesthesia – it’s just a product of our environment. “If I put a number on a computer screen and ask you to tap a key with your left hand if it's less than five, or with your right hand if it's greater than five, you will be faster to respond than if it's the opposite orientation,” Professor Anina Rich, who leads the Synaesthesia Research Group at Macquarie University in Australia, told ABC News in 2021. It could even be one of the most common types of synesthesia out there.īut why would this particular mix-up be so prominent? If you’ve been reading till now and wondering whether you’ve been a little bit of a calendar synesthete all along, you might have hit upon the reason why already. And while it’s not as well-known as other forms of the sense-switching condition, like the ability to “ see music” or “ taste words”, some reports suggest it may be more common than we think. One or 2 percent of the population may not sound like a lot, but it adds up to more than 3 million time-space synesthetes in the USA alone. Intriguingly, when "she rotated her head rightward, the left portion of her calendar became ‘fuzzy’, and memories of February and March became less accessible.” How common is calendar synesthesia? “December on her right July was 3 feet in front of her,” the researchers wrote in a second paper. Meanwhile another participant – one whose calendar was rooted on her body rather than her head – reported that memories could be partially “blocked” if she turned her gaze away from when they happened. “We found that (1) ML could ‘read off’ months of her calendar – or alternate months – backward, unlike controls (2) her eyes and index finger unconsciously 'tracked' her reading (3) her calendar moved with her gaze and tilted with her head (4) after looking at a contracting spiral, her calendar expanded,” explained a 2016 paper on the phenomenon.
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