The Incredible World of Synesthesia

Enjoy the AD-FREE versions of our latest episodes and our archives right now on Patreon. Help Us By Taking This Short Audience Survey Tonight, my special guest is Dr. Richard Cytowic who's here to discuss his years of research into an extrasensory phenomena that is truly mind-blowing! Get his book Synesthesia on Amazon.  Follow us on Instagram @mysteriousradio Follow us on TikTok mysteriousradioTikTok Follow us on Twitter @mysteriousradio Follow us on Pinterest pinterest.com/mysteriousradio Like us on Facebook Facebook.com/mysteriousradio Visit our website: https://www.mysteriousradio.com Check Out Mysterious Radio! (copy the link to share with your friends and family via text) An accessible, concise primer on the neurological trait of synesthesia―vividly felt sensory couplings―by a founder of the field. One in twenty-three people carry the genes for the synesthesia. Not a disorder but a neurological trait―like perfect pitch―synesthesia creates vividly felt cross-sensory couplings. A synesthete might hear a voice and at the same time see it as a color or shape, taste its distinctive flavor, or feel it as a physical touch. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Richard Cytowic, the expert who returned synesthesia to mainstream science after decades of oblivion, offers a concise, accessible primer on this fascinating human experience. Cytowic explains that synesthesia's most frequent manifestation is seeing days of the week as colored, followed by sensing letters, numerals, and punctuation marks in different hues even when printed in black. Other manifestations include tasting food in shapes, seeing music in moving colors, and mapping numbers and other sequences spatially. One synesthete declares, “Chocolate smells pink and sparkly”; another invents a dish (chicken, vanilla ice cream, and orange juice concentrate) that tastes intensely blue. Cytowic, who in the 1980s revived scientific interest in synesthesia, sees it now understood as a spectrum, an umbrella term that covers five cluste