Patterns in Color Perception

Schimmel/Conrades Science Center 167

Synesthesia is a neurological condition that forces individuals to process a lot of different senses at once. These different senses can be stimulated by anything; for example, if one hears some sounds, they might also perceive those sounds as colors and vice versa. Another form of Synesthesia, termed Grapheme-Color Synesthesia, can occur when one looks at different characters in a language and they see different colors generated in their brain. The amount of colors a person sees by looking at different characters varies. Our goal for our project was to figure out how different languages stimulate different neurological senses for Grapheme-Color Synesthesia patients and whether or not there is a link between the number of colors a patient sees and the type of characters they are looking at. This project explored the relationship between characters of various languages, the complexity of these characters, and color perception. We analyzed data from the “KANJI-Synesthetic Colors Database” that was originally created by Daisuke Hamada, Hiroki Yamamoto, and Jun Saiki. Although some of our questions were answered more thoroughly than others, we found patterns in the data that were related to the topics we set out to explore.