A multidisciplinary analysis of synesthesia across neuroscience, genetics, information theory, and the philosophy of mind.
Author: Alexandru C. Stan · ORCID 0000-0002-7463-0393 License: CC BY 4.0 · Versions: see the Releases tab
Synesthesia — the automatic, involuntary coupling in which one stimulus (an inducer) triggers an additional percept (a concurrent) in a second pathway — is examined across neuroscience, genetics, linguistics, information theory, and the philosophy of mind. One thesis runs throughout: the trait is not a stray wire between two sensory maps but a difference in representational architecture. The mapping is assembled over a childhood window and thins in old age; its candidate genes converge on axon guidance rather than any single “synesthesia gene”; its colors carry strikingly little information beyond their inducer — an idiosyncratic residual of roughly 80–110 bits across the alphabet, about a short password’s worth; and its inducers are often conceptual (ideasthesia) rather than sensory. Drawing on cross-script color transfer, the metamodal cortical recruitment seen in blind echolocation and engineered sensory substitution, and the fact that the light wave is colorless while color is attributed, the essay argues that the brain assigns incoming signal to a built internal geometry — which sense fills the map being secondary to the map itself — and closes on what this implies for representationalism, the binding problem, and the study of consciousness.
synesthesia.pdf— typeset reading copy
Cite the concept DOI (always resolves to the latest version):
Stan, A. C. (2026). Synesthesia: Mechanisms, Mappings, and the Geometry of the Senses (Version 1.0) [Essay]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21859233