Perceptual Narrowing - Synaesthesia and Perceptual Narrowing

Synaesthesia and Perceptual Narrowing

Synaesthesia is a condition in which the stimulation of one sense evokes an additional stimulation in another sense, such as a tone (auditory stimulation) evoking the experience of color or shapes (visual stimulation). Some research suggests that infants universally have this experience due to the greater number of functional synaptic connections across sensory domains compared to adults, and that over the course of normal development this experience dissipates through the process of perceptual narrowing. There is evidence that a failure in the perceptual narrowing process can, in rare cases, lead to adult synaethesia.