Synesthesia: Hearing colors and tasting sounds
Writer Vladimir Nabokov had it, and he called it "color hearing."
(Online) - Can you taste sounds or visualize symphonies of color whenever you hear a song? If your answer to these is "yes," you may have a wonderful condition known as synesthesia, which you share with many great artists, writers, and musicians.
Writer Vladimir Nabokov had it, and he called it "color hearing."
By his own account, Nabokov saw each letter in different colors, despite the fact that text was printed all-black on white paper.
Interestingly, both his wife and his son shared this fascinating ability, though they each saw different palettes of color for the alphabet.
"My wife has this gift of seeing letters in color, too, but her colors are completely different," declared the writer in an interview.
[W]e discovered one day that my son [...] sees letters in colors, too. Then we asked him to list his colors and we discovered that in one case, one letter which he sees as purple, or perhaps mauve, is pink to me and blue to my wife. This is the letter M. So the combination of pink and blue makes lilac in his case. Which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle?"
Many other cultural personalities besides Nabokov have reported having a form of synesthesia, including painter Wassily Kandinsky, inventor Nikola Tesla, and composer Franz Liszt.
The word "synesthesia" is derived from Latin and literally means "concomitant sensations." People with this condition — often referred to as "synesthetes" — experience a unique blending of two senses or perceptions.
This may be sounds automatically coupled with tastes, sounds with colors, or written letters with colors.
There are actually various different types of synesthesia, and people who have one type might often also experience another. But how many different types of synesthesia are there?
Researchers explain that this is difficult to deduce. Since there are five traditionally accepted senses — sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell — and synesthesia is characterized by the crossover of two senses or perceptions, there could be numerous possible combinations.
The most commonly reported types of synesthesia, however, are color-graphemic, in which letters, numbers, or geometric shapes are linked to colors or patterns, and color-auditory synesthesia, in which various sounds immediately recall specific colors, shapes, or textures.
One synesthete who spoke to Medical News Today gave us a highly impressive description of her experience of color-auditory synesthesia.
"As far back as I can remember," she told MNT, "I would experience music on the radio as a colorful landscape of moving shapes in my head, whereas speech would invoke mental images of a single moving line of color — a bit like a floating stroke of spray paint, hanging in the air."
"[The sound produced by] each [musical] instrument has its own color... Flutes are sky-blue whereas an oboe is more indigo... The sound of a piano seems to me like iridescent white cubes moving around in clusters as though they’re floating in water."
Like a number of other synesthetes, however, she also has another form of synesthesia: the color-graphemic kind, which causes her to experience numbers and letters in particular colors. In her case, however, it comes with some unique twists.
"For instance," she said, "there are no purple numbers...and yet both 7 and 8 are blue...(Although 7 is sky-blue and 8 is indigo)," adding that, for her, "Words are usually the color of their first letter."
"This isn’t always the case though," she notes. "Friday for instance is brown, when F is green and Thursday is maroon, when T is indigo...I see the days of the week as though they’re on a ladder, with Saturday and Sunday as the top two steps — I’ve heard that some others see this as well!"
It is difficult to say how many people actually experience synesthesia, mainly because there is very little research that has aimed to address this question. Moreover, some people may not know that what they experience is unusual, and so they may not speak about it.
The synesthesia that MNTinterviewed explained to us that she did not, in fact, realize for a long time that her condition was unique, having assumed that most people experience something similar.
I always knew that my specific coloring of letters and numbers was personal to me, but presumed everyone else had a similar code of their own," she told us.
"And then at primary school, I realized not everyone saw colors and imagery in this way...but," she went on, "it was only in university that I realized that it was a real minority of us who had synesthesia."
Researchers at Boston University in Massachusetts have suggested that around "1 in every 100,000 people to 1 in every 5,000 people" have one or more forms of synesthesia.
A study that was conducted in 2006 by several researchers based at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom indicated that color-graphemic synesthesia may be experienced by just over 1 percent of individuals.
The study authors also concluded that this kind of perception may nevertheless be more common than we would have thought, saying that "the prevalence of synesthesia [seemed to be] 88 times higher than previously assumed."
