Algorithmic synesthesia

We often think about our sense as separate and independent of each other. However, there are at least four problems with this naive view. First, our experience of the world around us is a rich multisensory one. Second, our sensations do seem to come together somehow into a unified experience. A third problem is that the senses do not merely converge somewhere; they also influence each other. The fourth reason to doubt the independence of the senses is that, for some individuals, stimulation in one sensory modality may actually give rise to perceptual experience in more than one modality. This remarkable form of perception is labelled synesthesia, and we distinguish here, before drawing some parallels between the two, between the involuntary psychological phenomenon and synsthesia in art involving intentional intermedia experimentation.