I think low-grade synaesthesia is very common, and might even be the norm, while full-blown synaesthesia may be as rare as the cited four percent. My main reason for thinking that is the...
I think low-grade synaesthesia is very common, and might even be the norm, while full-blown synaesthesia may be as rare as the cited four percent. My main reason for thinking that is the bouba/kiki effect, where non-synesthetic individuals show a very strong preference (around 90%) for pairing a certain shape with a certain sequence of sounds, even though the word is entirely imaginary. It is kind of a mantra in linguistics that word-idea relationships are arbitrary; and most probably are, because of historical sound change, but still, there seem to be certain associations even beyond onomatopoeia that exist between concepts and sounds almost universally.
I don't consider myself to have synaesthesia - I don't have any particular consistent association between sounds and colors, or graphemes and colors, or tastes and sounds, or anything like that. But I remember in an art history class, we were talking about Wassily Kandinsky's paintings based on Modest Mussorgsky's music - Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite of music that was itself inspired by a set of paintings - and I had a strong sense of wrongness: Kandinsky's paintings were somehow either too round or too angular for the music. I think that's an example of the same sound-shape symbolism as the bouba/kiki effect - and an example of everyday low-grade synaesthesia.
I think low-grade synaesthesia is very common, and might even be the norm, while full-blown synaesthesia may be as rare as the cited four percent. My main reason for thinking that is the bouba/kiki effect, where non-synesthetic individuals show a very strong preference (around 90%) for pairing a certain shape with a certain sequence of sounds, even though the word is entirely imaginary. It is kind of a mantra in linguistics that word-idea relationships are arbitrary; and most probably are, because of historical sound change, but still, there seem to be certain associations even beyond onomatopoeia that exist between concepts and sounds almost universally.
I don't consider myself to have synaesthesia - I don't have any particular consistent association between sounds and colors, or graphemes and colors, or tastes and sounds, or anything like that. But I remember in an art history class, we were talking about Wassily Kandinsky's paintings based on Modest Mussorgsky's music - Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite of music that was itself inspired by a set of paintings - and I had a strong sense of wrongness: Kandinsky's paintings were somehow either too round or too angular for the music. I think that's an example of the same sound-shape symbolism as the bouba/kiki effect - and an example of everyday low-grade synaesthesia.