IMR Press / FBL / Volume 26 / Issue 4 / DOI: 10.2741/4918

Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.

Review
Synesthesia, hallucination, and autism
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1 University of Southern Indiana, Philosophy Program, College of Liberal Arts, Evansville IN 47712
Send correspondence to: Rocco J. Gennaro, University of Southern Indiana, Philosophy Program, College of Liberal Arts, LA 3055, 8600 University Blvd., Evansville IN, 47712, Tel: 812-464-1744, Fax: 812-465-7152, E-mail: rjgennaro@usi.edu
Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2021, 26(4), 797–809; https://doi.org/10.2741/4918
Published: 1 October 2020
Abstract

Synesthesia literally means a “union of the senses” whereby two or more of the five senses that are normally experienced separately are involuntarily and automatically joined together in experience (1, 2, 3). For example, some synesthetes experience a color when they hear a sound, although many instances of synesthesia also occur entirely within the visual sense. In this paper, I first mainly engage critically with Sollberger’s view that there is reason to think that at least some synesthetic experiences can be viewed as truly veridical perceptions, and not as illusions or hallucinations (4). Among other things, I explore the possibility that many forms of synesthesia can be understood as experiencing what I will call “second-order secondary properties,” that is, experiences of properties of objects induced by the secondary qualities of those objects. In doing so, I shed some light on why synesthesia is typically one-directional and its relation to some psychopathologies such as autism.

Keywords
Synesthesia
Hallucination
Autism
Perception
Concepts
Color
Review
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