SYNESTHESIA AND THIN BOUNDARIES OF THE MIND

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which the lines between senses are blurred, suggesting permeable boundaries in the mind. This notion of boundary permeability is inherently linked with Openness to Experience, one of the Big Five personality traits. Conversely, some people are characterized by heavy boundaries and thus a lack of Openness. Since the 1930s, the relationship between Openness and boundaries has been important in political psychology, as previous research has established that conservatives tend to be low in Openness, while the opposite is true for liberals. Authoritarianism can be seen as the embodiment of a mind with thick boundaries, while the most pure example of a thin-bounded mind would be synesthesia. I perform a text analysis of Reddit comments made by 117 self-reported synesthetes and compare their responses to the Openness category of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), to examine whether synesthesia correlates with Openness.