Synesthesia: Augmented Reality

“If you are not a spatial sequence synesthete, imagine your car parked in the space in front of you. Although you do not physically see it there, you will have no trouble pointing to the front wheel, the driver’s side window, the rear bumper, and so on. The car has three-dimensional coordinates in your mental space. So it is with automatically triggered number forms.” (109)

Spatial Sequence Synesthesia is about half as common as Grapheme > Color Synesthesia (25). People with this form of synesthesia are often very good at math because of their ability to perceive the numbers pseudo-visually. This form of synesthesia can, however, be detrimental to the synesthete, one woman with number form synesthesia complained to her math teacher about having trouble with her homework because “the digits keep going up to their places.” So synesthesia is not always a walk in the park for everybody, depending on the context. Synesthesia is an advanced neurological condition that begins in early childhood. Scientists don’t know everything about this condition and although there is significant evidence that it is heavily hereditary, nothing is known for certain. Even the results of various tests can never be completely accurate. What is undeniable is the reality of synesthesia and the profound effect it has on peoples’ lives, whether they realize that they have it or not.

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