Synesthesia and The Effect of Color on Taste Perception

"The word synesthesia, meaning "joined sensation", shares a root with anesthesia, meaning "no sensation." It denotes the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other equally startling sensory blendings whose quality seems difficult for most of us to imagine. A synesthete might describe the color, shape, and flavor of someone's voice, or music whose sound looks like "shards of glass," a scintillation of jagged, colored triangles moving in the visual field. Or, seeing the color red, a synesthete might detect the "scent" of red as well. The experience is frequently projected outside the individual, rather than being an image in the mind's eye. I currently estimate that 1/25,000 individuals is born to a world where one sensation involuntarily conjures up others, sometimes all five clashing together (Cytowic, 1989, 1993). "

http://psyche.csse.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html

The particular synesthesia that deals with colors is the condition known as Grapheme-color snyesthesia where synesthetes report seeing numbers and letters having a particular color. An interesting quote from the Wikipedia article cites a writer and synesthete named Patricia Lynne Duffy discussing her synesthetic experience:

"'One day,' I said to my father, 'I realized that to make an 'R' all I had to do was first write a 'P' and then draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line.'"


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme-color_synesthesia

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The links that follow are about color in relation to food. The first article discusses how color affects one's appetite while the second link discusses how adding vibrantly colored food to one's diet can make a person healthier and even ward off cancer.















http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/02/05/is-visual-taste-perception-coloring-your-appetite/

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/07/29/color-guide-to-staying-healthy-and-eating-right/

:D