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Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled. For example, in a form of synesthesia known as grapheme-color synesthesia, letters or numbers may be perceived as inherently colored. Historically, the most commonly described form of synesthesia (or synesthesia-like mappings) has been between sound and vision, e.g. the hearing of colors in music. ==Early investigations of colored hearing== The interest in colored hearing, i.e. the co-perception of colour in hearing sounds or music, dates back to Greek antiquity, when philosophers were investigating whether the colour (''chroia'', what we now call timbre) of music was a physical quality that could be quantified.〔Gage, J. ''Colour and Culture. Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction''. (London:Thames & Hudson, 1993).〕 The seventeenth-century physicist Isaac Newton tried to solve the problem by assuming that musical tones and colour tones have frequencies in common.〔Peacock, Kenneth. "Instruments to Perform Color-Music: Two Centuries of Technological Experimentation," ''Leonardo'' 21, No. 4 (1988) 397-406.〕 The age-old quest for colour-pitch correspondences in order to evoke perceptions of coloured music finally resulted in the construction of color organs and performances of colored music in concert halls at the end of the nineteenth century.〔〔Jewanski, J. & N. Sidler (Eds.). Farbe - Licht - Musik. Synaesthesie und Farblichtmusik. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006.〕 (For more information, see the synesthesia in art page). John Locke in ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' (1689) reports: Whether this is an actual instance of synesthesia, or simply reflects metaphorical speech, is debated. A similar example appears in Leibniz's ''New Essays on Human Understanding'' (written in 1704, but not published until 1764); indeed given that the ''New Essays'' is intended as a rebuttal to Locke, it may even have been the same individual. Although it is mainly speculation, there is reason to believe that the person Locke referred to was the mathematician and scientist Nicholas Saunderson, who held the Lucasian professor chair at Cambridge University, and whose general prominence would have made his statements noticeable. In ''Letters on the blind'', Denis Diderot, one of Locke's followers, mentions Saunderson by name in related philosophical reflections. In 1710, Thomas Woolhouse reported the case of another blind man who perceived colors in response to sounds. The first agreed upon account of synesthesia comes from Sachs in 1812, who reports on his colored vowels as part of his PhD dissertation (on his albinism), although its importance has only become apparent restrospectively. Numerous other philosophers and scientists, including Isaac Newton (1704), Erasmus Darwin (1790) and Wilhelm Wundt (1874) may have referred to synesthesia, or at least synesthesia-like mappings between colors and musical notes. Henry David Thoreau remarked in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1848 that a child he knew had asked him "if I did not use ‘''colored'' words.’ She said that she could tell the color of a great many words, and amused the children at school by so doing."〔Sanborn, F.B. ''The Writings of Henry David Thoreau'', Vol. VI: Familiar Letters, part II, p. 150〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of synesthesia research」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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