Colors of Hearings: A Subjective Experience of Synesthesia Among Six Siblings

Date

2023-1-31

Author

Alma, Leyla
Çoksan, Sami
Koca-Atabey, Müjde

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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The current research aimed to explore, understand and describe the subjective experiences of synesthesia among six self-reported synesthete siblings. For this purpose, we conducted one quantitative and one qualitative study. The first study aimed to measure whether six siblings actually had synesthesia experiences. Six synesthete siblings and their eighteen non-synesthete peers participated in Study 1. First, participants filled out the Eagleman Synesthesia Test Battery - Synesthesia Type Scale. Then, we asked the participants to match some words we randomly selected from the Turkish dictionary with colors on a color scale. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons showed that six siblings statistically and consistently matched words with specific colors compared to their non-synesthete peers, and these colors hardly changed over time. In study 2, we interviewed these siblings and aimed to investigate their synesthetic experiences using an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach. We verbatim transcribed the interviews, and the results showed that three main themes emerged, which were: (1) The nature of the synesthesia experience; (2) Aspects of the synesthesia experience; (3) Time and experience: It may change inter and intraparticipant. We discussed the findings in the context of the persistence and changeability of the synesthetic experience and the uniqueness seen among siblings, even when raised in a similar environment.

Subject Keywords

Synesthesia, Synesthetic experience, Grapheme-color synesthesia, Interpretive phenomenological analysis, Sinestezi, Sinestetik deneyim, Grafem-renk sineztezisi, Yorumlayıcı fenomenolojik analiz

URI

https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/ayna/issue/75705/1144465
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/102803

Collections

Department of Psychology, Article