Have you ever heard of color synesthesias? Do you think it could be spiritual?

Question

Peter..maybe you should go to M.H. with this "condition". Maybe I can "help" you. LOL

Answer 1

This is the first time I ever heard about it.

I found an article on

Grapheme-color synesthesia;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme-co...

In it they said they can produce the same effect with a computer program, so I would be led to believe that it is not spiritual but Personal perception.

Answer 2

I would have to say its purely a mental stimuli. but some claim mental conditions are spiritual!

Answer 3

Many people have imagined synesthesia as a philosophical question, and of course, absence of proof is not proof of absence, so it's not possible for me to say anything but speculation about the spirit<soul<afterlife<God half of the question. So try to understand first, the nature of the condition.

A very good way to understand synesthesia (the interpretation of a stimuli [like the color red] by an non-usual receptor [say, the little "ear" stereos in your head]) is almost repeating the definition.

So if you had this kind of Synesthesia, it would be a matter of your brain -the head of the computing 'machine' that is your body- has certain routes from stimulus to the impulse that says "Hey! That color sounds like middle C every time I see it!"

However, the other type of color synesthesia, the interpretation of a non-color specific item as a specific color, affords the most evidence that synesthesia is a revision of "normal" human neural pathways comes from simple first person reports.

""One day," I said to my father, "I realized that to make an 'R' all I had to do was first write a 'P' and then draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line."

– Writer Patricia Lynne Duffy, recalling an early experience.""

In Duffy's experience it's still no simple matter, but we would have to imbue different letters with different spiritual meanings for it to be anything but the 'machine' adding information where there was none - an orange R is an orange letter every time se sees it, whether black, blue or purple ink was used to write it.

It's a really interesting subject, and an incredibly deep one with many ontological barbs all the way down, but even if there is a higher purpose for the added information, there would be as many ways of regarding the state as there are religions.

I've found it's best to give a little conclusion after a good ramble, so here it is:

Color synesthesia, like -anything- else could be caused or created by a higher power, yes, but its mechanism has been mostly found to be a neurological condition, and is being studied scientifically.

Answer 4

I bet you know what my answer will be.

Although it's possible for synesthesia to be spiritual there is no reason to think it is.  I think it would take quite a bit of imagination and motivation to make this phenomena seem spiritual, especially since it's such a common neurological condition.

For the record, I do not have color synesthesia, but I do have a similar cognitive spatial synesthesia.  I associate certain people or tasks with specific geographic locations that are completely unrelated to them.  I do not consider this to be spiritual, just a mental way of keeping track of things.