Define and differentiate "sensation" and "perception":

Sensations are measurement of external stimuli of different nature that our body performs with a lot of sensors distributed all around our body. Those measures are usually encapsulated in electrical signals, that from the sensors navigate to the brain to get processed. Hearing, for example, measures sounds around us.

Perceptions are the interpretation elaborated by our brain of the sensations, which are based on personal and genetic experience.

 

Our eyes for example are the system of sensors that measure the light that hits them, and they sense it in a way that will make everything appears upside down. Our brain elaborate this sensation, and make us perceive straight images.

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Discuss synaesthesia:

Synaesthesia is a psychological phenomenon that manifest in some person, which make them associate elements from different sensorial spaces.

For example, a synesthetic could perceive a taste while looking at some colour or feel a particular smell while hearing some tunes.

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It’s not clear why this happens, and there are a lot of different subjects that present this condition, and by the statistics observed in the article from Dr Jamie Ward, it appears that it might be related to X chromosomes, as its common to present in families, especially females.

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Synaesthesia is an open chapter in psychology, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions. For example, we are still not sure if our brain makes this associations based on pure genetic structure, pure human learning process or maybe a mix of the two, but by observing, asking and experimenting on subjects that claim to experience sensorial associations we are narrowing down the topic, learning new information about human brain.