[Colors, tastes, numbers?: synesthesia in a Spanish sample]

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology

Background:

• Synesthesia is a neurological condition where one sensory or cognitive stimulus triggers an involuntary, automatic, and consistent experience in another unstimulated sensory or cognitive pathway.
• These cross-sensory experiences are a fascinating area of study in understanding brain function and perception.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine the prevalence of various synesthesia modalities within a Spanish population.
• To provide a quantitative overview of synesthetic experiences in a diverse sample.

Main Methods:

• The Synesthesia Questionnaire, developed by the Artecitta Foundation, was administered to 803 participants.
• Data were collected across educational, labor, and digital settings, reflecting varied contexts of experience.

Main Results:

• 13.95% of the participants reported experiencing some form of synesthesia.
• Spatial sequence synesthesia was the most prevalent modality (44.6%), followed by sound-to-color (33.9%), color-to-time (25.9%), letter/number-personality (20.5%), grapheme-color (10.7%), and word-to-flavor (5.4%).

Conclusions:

• The high prevalence suggests synesthesia is more common in the Spanish sample than previously assumed.
• Further research into synesthesia's phenomenological variability, genetics, and neurophysiology is warranted.
• The findings can inform improvements to synesthesia assessment tools, enhancing their accuracy and discriminative power.