The most common types of synesthesia

These are the most common types of synesthesia:

Grapheme-colour / Coloured sequences

The most common type of all is coloured sequence synesthesia, which includes grapheme-colour (letters/words/numbers-colour) and time units-colour (days/months-colour). Most synesthetes have at least one of these types.

Chromesthesia / Auditory-visual

The next most common type is auditory-visual synesthesia, more specifically chromesthesia (where music or sound induce perceptions consisting of, or including, colour). It is estimated that somewhere under half of all of all synesthetes could have one or more of its subtypes.

Ordinal linguistic personification (OLP)

Another relatively frequent type is ordinal linguistic personification, where a gender, personality and other human characteristics are attributed to sequences such as letters and numbers.

Spatial sequence

And a fourth type that is also quite common is spatial sequence synesthesia, which consists of visualising certain sequences in physical space, the most frequent being the calendar (days, months, years, etc.) and numbers.

 

Go to the list of types of synesthesia by prevalence

This page is about the most common types of synaesthesia

This page is about the commonest types of synesthesia