Academic
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IELTS Reading Practice Test 1.
Passage 1
Synaesthesia
A.
Imagine a page with a square box in the middle. The box is lined with rows
of the number 5,repeated over and over. All of the 5s are identical in size, font
and colour, and equally distributed across the box. There is, however, a trick:
among those 5s, hiding in plain sight is a single, capital letter S. Almost the
same in shape, it is impossible to spot without straining your eyes for a good
few minutes. Unless that is, you are a grapheme – colour synaesthete – a
person who sees each letter and number in different colours. With all the 5
painted in one colour and the rogue S painted in another, a grapheme – colour
synaesthete will usually only need a split second to identify the latter.
B.
Synaesthesia, loosely translated as “senses coming together” from the
Greek words syn (“with”) and aesthesis (“sensation”), is an interesting
neurological phenomenon that causes different senses to be combined. This
might mean that words have a particular taste (for example, the word “door”
might taste like bacon), or that certain smells produce a particular colour. It
might also mean that each letter and number has its own personality-the letter
A might be perky, the letter B might be shy and self-conscious, etc. Some
synaesthetes might even experience other people’s sensations, for example
feeling pain in their chest when they witness a film character gets shot. The
possibilities are endless: even though synaesthesia is believed to affect less
than 5% of the general population, at least 60 different combinations of
senses have been reported so far. What all these sensory associations have
in common is that they are all involuntary and impossible to repress and that
they usually remain quite stable over time.
C.
Synaesthesia was first documented in the early 19th century by German
physician Georg Sachs, who dedicated two pages of his dissertation on his
own experience with the condition. It wasn’t, however, until the mid-1990s that
empirical research proved its existence when Professor Simon Baron-Cohen
and his colleagues used on six synaesthetes and discovered that the parts of
the brain associated with vision were active during auditory stimulation, even
though the subjects were blindfolded.
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