Have Your Say! - Synesthesia in the language

From: Julio
Date: Sat, Dec 9, 2017

Synesthesia is the natural-born skill in which some people perceive one sensory stimulus in two senses, mixing senses. For example, there are people who can see images when they hear sounds, or feel on their skin some sounds, or taste some sounds, etc.

But, what call my attention more is that apparently there is some kind of slight synesthesia in the everyday language, (and specially in literature). This would prove that everybody is a bit synesthetic.

There are many examples. For instance, expressions like "dark music", "to feel blue", "bitter truth", etc., use adjectives belonging to the realm of one sense with nouns belonging to the realm of another different, as visual with hearing, for instance. Apparently, these are semantic mistakes. However, everybody somewhat understands the meaning of these expressions, and I think this is because we all have a bit of sensory intermixing.

Another stronger proof of this is the bouba/kiki experiment: Most people associate the name kiki with the image with vertices, (because both the pronunciation of kiki and the vertices in the starred image are spiky), and associate the name bouba with the rounded image, (because they aren't spiky).