“ A more promising approach to thinking about how these intriguing patterns of association (like names being ’sexy’ or shapes being ‘kiki’ or ‘booba’) arise consistently and remain stable is not so much to look at synesthesia, in my opinion, but to look more closely at the phenomenology of these sensations. For example, Ramachandran and Brang describe how movements of the mouth might make certain names sound ’sexy’; the easier explanation is to look to these movements, not to point to synesthesia, which typically involves arbitrary, unimodal sensory associations.
