Colour Psychology -- Synaesthesia

Colour Psychology covers the colour preferences of different people, such as children, adolescents, normal and abnormal groups.

By contrast, it also deals with the effects that colours have on people.

Colours have a special role to play in the expression of personality, mood and emotion.

Colour psychology studies the perception of colour and deals with some of the extraordinary illusions that are possible with colour. It also studies constancy , which is the even more amazing ability that one has to recognise the same colours under different lighting.

There are remarkable differences between the concepts of psychological colour-symbolism in the systems of Freud and Jung.

One of the strangest of phenomena under the heading of colour psychology is that of synaesthesia.

Synesthesia is defined as an involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association. In real language that means that there is a crossing of the senses. Having one sense stimulated would cause a stimulation in another sense as well. This would be like a ringing bell being heard and seen(maybe as a flash of light).

It comes from Greek with syn meaning together and aisthesis, perception. So, literally it is a joining of sensations.

Diagnostic Features

There are five main diagnostic features of synesthesia, as defined by Cytowic:

• the sensations are involuntary: they can not be surpressed or incurred, though the intensity is influenced by the situation they occur in
• the sensations are projected into the environment: it is not just in the head but the person actually sees a sound or hears a picture, etc.
• the sensations are durable and generic: every time you hear a bell you always see red, it doesn't change over time or situation and will always be experienced with the stimulus
• the sensations are memorable: they are often the aspect of something that is remembered best. For example it may be easier to remember that a person's name is yellow than the name, although the color helps to recall the name
• the sensations are emotional: having this experience causes ecstasy and is viewed as an accomplishment

Who Has It?

Incidence:

• one in every 25,000 people born have synesthesia, but this estimate is thought to be low

Women:

• studies done in the United States show that three times as many women as men have synesthesia
• Studies from UK reveal that eight times as many women as men are affected

Lefties:

• it appears more frequently among left-handed people

Families:

• it is seen as genetic, probably through the x-chromosome, and is dominant, rather than recessive
• 15% of people who have synesthesia have a history of someone in their first degree family having dyslexia, autism or attention deficit disorder.

Experience:

• the synesthetic experience is different for every individual. For example, among people who see letters as colored, there is not a set color for each letter from person to person. Everyone has their own colored alphabet.

Many people make an instantaneous association of certain colours with particular sounds.Synaesthesia is 'just another way of processing information' said Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, a lecturer in psychology at Cambridge University. It's not a disease, 'it has a physical basis in the brain? he said. The scientist Sir Francis Galton tried to find some consistancy among those who experienced synaesthesia and found very little. On the other hand, some investigators have tried to construct systems relating colour to sound, whilst others thought that there could not be a relationship at all. The German philosopher, J.W.Von Goethe believed that if there was a connection that it must be related to 'a higher formula'.

The Medieval philosopher, Gafurius describes the music of the spheres and gives a diagramatic illustration of the relation between the Greek modes and the celestial bodies, planets, sun and moon, all having their own colours. It was this relationship which explains the colour music theories of the intelleigentia of the Middle Ages.