Students get taste of life with synesthesia
Studio art senior Ryan Esch writes down characteristics to figure out what color his personality is at an event held by MSU S.E.N.S.E.S. on Friday afternoon in Giltner Hall.
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When psychology senior Krista Bur was in fifth grade, she told her teacher her name was yellow.
“She just kind of looked at me like I was crazy,” Bur said. “It was then I realized I was different.”
After doing research, Bur found out she had a rare, neurologically based condition called synesthesia, a phenomenon in which stimulation of one sense leads to involuntary stimulation of another sense in the brain. For some synesthetes, or people with synesthesia, this could mean seeing letters and numbers in color or tasting words as they read them.
On Friday afternoon, MSU S.E.N.S.E.S., or campus club Students Exploring New Sensory Experiences in Synesthesia, hosted Eating Words & Feeling Sounds: The Synesthesia Experience, an event that allowed attendees to experience what it’s like to live with synesthesia for a day.
“We really want to reach out to as many people as we can to show the world that this is something cool,” said Bur, who helped organize Friday’s event.
About 40 people came to the event, which took place in Giltner Hall and featured five stations that depicted different forms of synesthesia, including one at which attendees took a personality test to determine the color of their temperament. Bur said the most popular station was the word-tasting station, at which participants were read a passage from Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” and had to eat different foods — including chocolate, Pop Rocks and Slim Jim deli sticks — as certain words were said.
Biology senior and letter-color synesthete Lauren Beggs said although most people initially view synesthesia as a negative condition, she considers herself lucky to have it.
“I can’t imagine sitting down to read a textbook for hours and just staring at an abyss of black letters,” Beggs said. “It would be really boring.”
Psychology junior Leah Panourgias, who came to the event to learn more about synesthesia because she knew a high school friend who had it, said she realized the condition does not have a negative impact.
“It’s something people are really happy with, and I can see why,” Panourgias said.
Synesthesia is one of the only neurological conditions recognized by psychology that’s not detrimental, Beggs said. The condition actually has a positive impact for many synesthetes — Bur said it makes it easier to remember phone numbers because she can more easily recall combinations of numbers and letters.
Bur said a key reason for putting on the event was to recruit fellow synesthetes who might not know they have the condition.
“It’s often a very earth-shattering experience for someone to realize they’re doing something differently that they never realized their whole life was different,” Bur said. “It’s nice for them to meet other synesthetes and talk about how their brain works and also meet people who are interested in it so they feel less ostracized.”
