A lightweight chrome extension to induce synesthetic experiences in non-synesthetic subjects.
Untested neuroscience experiment!
Chromethesia is a chrome extension currently being tested to see if synesthetic experiences can be induced in people who do not have synesthesia by simply browsing the web!
A while back, I read an article by three researchers at the University of Amsterdam in (you guessed it) Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In the article, they examined whether grapheme-color synesthesia, a form of synesthesia in which an individual associates and perceives numbers and letters with distinct colors, can be acquired by a person who is not synesthetic through long term exposure to colored characters. In the experiment they performed, non-synesthetes were given a set of books which had been prepared such that each character in the book had a specific color which was used instead of the standard black text. The colors remained consistent across the set of books. They discovered that, after reading one book with > 50,000 words, the subjects had experienced induced effects sufficient enough to be regarded as behavioral markers for synesthesia.
I found this discovery to be super interesting so I thought about how I could test it out on myself and see if I could have an induced synesthetic experience. Thus, this project was born. Keep in mind, however, that I am in no way a neuroscientist nor qualified to say that this extension will produce synesthetic experiences in you, the reader. Test it out and see what happens!
Yes, I know that Chromesthesia is another type of synesthesia in which sound evokes an experience of color in the subject however I couldn't let a name like Chromethesia slip away so whoops 😄.
- Enable chrome developer mode
- Download the .crx extension from the releases page found at https://github.com/andr-dev/Chromethesia/releases
- Go to chrome://extensions/ and enable the "Developer Mode" toggle in the top right corner
- Drag the .crx file into the extensions window and click "Add Extension"
No additional setup is required.
Currently, the color values are hard coded into a file called background.js in a data table at the top of the file. First, download the source code of the latest release found at https://github.com/andr-dev/Chromethesia/releases. Extract the zip and open a file called background.js with a code editor. Edit the hex color values to your preference and then save the file. To install the extension, go to chrome://extensions/ and enable the "Developer Mode" toggle in the top right corner. Then, select load unpacked and select the extracted folder where you made the edits. Chromethesia should now be installed!
If you would like to contribute to this project, follow these steps.
-
Option 1
- 🍴 Fork 🍴 this repo!
-
Option 2
- 👯 Clone 👯 this repo to your local machine using
https://github.com/andr-dev/Chromethesia.git
- 👯 Clone 👯 this repo to your local machine using
- 🔨 Hack Away At It! 🔨
- Create a new pull request 🔁 using
https://github.com/andr-dev/Chromethesia/compare/.
If you have any issues, open up a new issue and I'll get to it as soon as possible!
Special thanks to Johann Burkard for creating highlight_class_version.js and for allowing its use in other projects with an MIT license. You can find him at http://johannburkard.de.
- MIT license
- Copyright 2020 © Andre Benedito.