“The word would fill her mind for a few minutes with a single color: not an unpleasant sensation but still an intrusion… Patriarch: Brown, she thought, a temple of a word, a shiny red brown, like the surface of a chestnut.”

The character Saga, in Julia Glass’ novel The Whole World Over, has a condition of synesthesia, in which she seems to sense colors in the words she reads, as illustrated below: Synaesthesia is a neat way to study differences in perception and their relation to higher cognitive functions such as memory and language processing.' But while scientists are interested in the. Example #6: The Whole World Over (By Julia Glass) Here, the poetess added a visual element to the buzzing sound “buzz” by describing it as having a blue color. In other words, a sense or concept is connected to a different sense or concept, such as smelling colors or tasting a word. Example #5: Dying (By Emily Dickinson)Įmily Dickinson, in her poem Dying, uses synesthesia: Synesthesia is a condition in which individuals experience atypical responses to certain types of stimuli, in addition to the typical responses elicited by. Synesthesia is a perception in which stimulating one sensory or cognitive pathway causes experiences in another sense or cognitive pathway. The speaker’s visual sense and his sense of hearing make him aware of his surroundings. In the above excerpt, the speaker reveals a blend of sensory experiences he is experiencing. The word synesthesia or synaesthesia, has its origin in the Greek roots, syn, meaning union, and aesthesis, meaning sensation: a union of the senses. Synesthesia is a neurological disorder where a person feels several of the five senses. Synesthesia is a neurological occurrence when one sensory experience automatically triggers another sense. That made me hear the wakening birds around,Īnd hear his long scythe whispering to the ground…” Online Therapy and Online Psychology Services 2022. Robert Frost, in his poem A Tuft of Flowers, uses synesthesia:

Example #4: A Tuft of Flowers (By Robert Frost) He associates the word “warm” with “gorgeous,” which is an attempt to blend the sense of touch with the sense of sight. In the above excerpt, King Lear makes fun of his daughter Goneril for wearing revealing attire. Why nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st, “Thou art a lady: if only to go warm were gorgeous, We see Shakespeare employing the synesthetic device in his play King Lear, Act 2, Scene 2:

Synthesia psychology