Cross-Sensory Attention

Role

Cross-sensory attention is the perceptual practice most directly associated with synesthetic perception — the involuntary cross-sensory association that characterizes approximately 4% of the population and that has been disproportionately represented in the biographical accounts of highly creative individuals across domains. The deliberate cultivation of cross-sensory attention in non-synesthetic practitioners develops a form of multi-modal perceptual richness that approaches synesthesia's creative benefit through voluntary practice — with the painter who deliberately translates musical experience into visual terms, the chef who deliberately translates color experience into flavor associations, and the architect who deliberately translates acoustic experience into spatial concepts all performing the cross-sensory creative connection-making that synesthetic perception enables automatically.