Award Date
August 2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Psychology
First Committee Member
Russell Hurlburt
Second Committee Member
Brenna Renn
Third Committee Member
Shane Kraus
Fourth Committee Member
Sara Hunt
Number of Pages
735
Abstract
Synesthesia is a rare, multivariant condition where the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive sense induces extraordinary inner experiences. Grapheme-color synesthesia is a kind of synesthesia where the presentation of letters and/or numbers induce automatic, directly apprehended color phenomena within synesthetes (i.e., individuals with synesthesia). Despite synesthesia’s being defined by remarkable color experiences, first-person investigations that directly study synesthetes’ inner experience are rare. We used descriptive experience sampling (DES) to describe the everyday inner experience of six grapheme-color synesthetes, each sampled for from 6 to 14 sampling days. Our idiographic findings showed that the salient features of each individual participant’s sampled experience were very different from non-synesthetes in that our synesthetes each had some anomalous characteristics and some unusually co-occurring phenomena. Anomalous experiences included instances where what had been apprehended (e.g., the experiential content) involved anomalous features (e.g., inner seeings from unusual perspectives) and instances where how phenomena had been apprehended (e.g., the experiential modality) was anomalous (e.g., visual phenomena that were apprehended as heard rather than seen). Anomalously co-occurring instances were single apprehended events that were directly apprehended across inextricably diverse simultaneous modes (e.g., directly apprehending toothache both as a felt sensation and an inner seeing). We found very few instances of conventional, straightforward grapheme-color phenomena.
Keywords
idiographic; inner experience; inner seeing; sensation; sensory modes; synesthesia
Disciplines
Clinical Psychology
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Kaneshiro, Cody Michio, "Exploring the Everyday Inner Experience of Grapheme-Color Synesthetes" (2024). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 5129.
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/5129
Rights
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