German researches found that chimpanzees associate high-pitched tones with light colors and low-pitched tones with dark colors. The research was taken to mean that chimpanzees also experience some form of syneaesthesia, a condition where the senses overlap. A person with synaesthesia would experience a shape as a taste or a color as a sound. Vera Ludwig, the neuroscientist that led the study, thinks that connections between words and colors emerge from the structure of the brain and its wiring. The purpose of the study was to determine if the associations between different senses are learned from other humans or innate in the brain. Captive chimpanzees were studied and the researches found that the chimps associate light objects with high tones and dark objects with deeper ones. Ludwig thinks that because synaesthesia occurs in chimps as well as humans, synaesthesia was already a part of the human species before language arose. Ludwig proposes that synaesthesia may have influenced human language.
I like it when we humans learn about our animalistic biases because being aware of those biases helps us make more informed decisions about everything we do. If biases such as associating a color with a sound exist, that leaves open the possibility that other biases exist that more directly influence how we act. For example people subconsciously attribute good qualities to attractive people and bad ones to unattractive people. Its good to know about these biases because although they are subconscious, they affect how we act.
http://www.nature.com/news/the-chimpanzee-who-sees-sounds-1.9541
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