Describing how music and vision are tied together in her perception, she says, “I see the screen of sound waves, and I control my memory by reading it during playing and manipulating it in time … to hear all the elements of musical texture.” This led to some challenges while she was learning to play the piano. Svetlana Rudenko, an accomplished, Ireland-based pianist, experiences a complex form of musical-space synaesthesia in which sounds become textured images in the space around her. In 2004, Tammet used his synaesthesia to help him memorise and recite the mathematical number π (pi) to over 20 000 decimal places.
Leading autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen has found that synaesthesia is more common among people with autism ( Baron-Cohen et al, 2013), a finding that links to the extraordinary case of Daniel Tammet, a high-functioning autistic man with multifaceted synaesthesia. So what type of people are most likely to experience synaesthesia? One recent study that screened thousands of people for synaesthesia has overturned a long-held belief that the phenomenon is more common in women ( Simner & Carmichael, 2015). Perhaps surprisingly, however, the letters I, O, X, and Z tend to be labelled as black or white by most grapheme-colour synaesthetes, even within an otherwise rainbow-coloured alphabet. Another finding is that most synaesthetic associations are very personal, and each grapheme-colour synaesthete’s vibrant alphabet is unique to them.
For example, some grapheme-colour synaesthetes see the evoked colours projected into their surroundings, while others perceive them only mentally, with their ‘mind’s eye’. Large studies comparing grapheme-colour synaesthetes to each other and to non-synaesthetes have revealed much diversity even within this one type of synaesthesia. Grapheme-colour synaesthesia is the most widely researched form, because it is easy to study using simple tests. Public domain image image source: Wikimedia Commons “The long à of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French à evokes polished ebony.” (Excerpt from synaesthete Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, 1951). At the other extreme are the captivating stories of people for whom words have tastes (lexical-gustatory synaesthesia), and musicians like Pharrell Williams who use their coloured hearing to shape their music (auditory-visual synaesthesia). One of the most common forms is grapheme-colour synaesthesia, which is the association of letters and numbers with specific colours. Cross-sensory associations evoked by stimuli such as letters, numbers and musical tones are known for every physical sense – from visual sensations such as colour, to sounds, smells, textures and even tastes.
Often, synaesthetes have no idea that their cross-sensory associations are unusual, even though they may experience several different types. Types of synaesthesiaĪ large study in the UK revealed that about four per cent of the population experiences a form of synaesthesia ( Simner et al, 2006). So far, links to both neurological and genetic factors have been found. It’s not clear why this happens, but synaesthesia is increasingly being studied scientifically in order to unravel the factors involved. It is a neurological phenomenon whereby a perception in one sense automatically evokes a sensation in another – so, for example, thinking about abstract ideas like numbers or days of the week evokes associations with specific colours. Synaesthesia literally means ‘joined perception’.
What colour is Tuesday? This question may not make sense to most people – but to some people, known as synaesthetes, it’s perfectly understandable, although each is likely to have a different answer. What would it be like if numbers and musical tones had colours? People with synaesthesia experience the world in this way – and scientists are trying to find out why.
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