7 Synesthesia Is Not an Illness

Synesthesia is not regarded as a neurological disease, because as a rule it does not seriously impact people’s everyday lives and is therefore also not described in neurological classification systems (ICD-10 or DSM-IV). Furthermore, there does not appear to be a connection between synesthesia and psychiatric illnesses, with the exception of the fact that synesthesia may be triggered by epilepsy.

There is a good deal of evidence that the occurrence of synesthesia is substantially influenced by early childhood experiences. Witthoft and colleagues discovered, for example, that in the case of one female synesthete there was a 100% agreement between the colors she associated with individual letters, and the colors of magnetic letters her parents had used to decorate the refrigerator in her childhood (Witthoft et al. 2006). However, most synesthetes report that their colors have been there since they began to think and provide no clues with respect to concrete situations to which the associations could be traced back.