When Julian Asher hears a violin, he sees red wine. However, this Imperial College London professor isn’t crazy: One out of every thousand people is said to experience this neurological condition called synesthesia. It causes two senses to blend together, so that stimulation of one sense triggers an entirely different one, involuntarily and simultaneously.
Here’s a theory on how it works: When one region of a person’s brain talks with another region that is wired to perceive a certain sense, the pathways cross and allow the person to experience “crossed senses.” Synesthesia is different for everyone who has it— some people claim they can smell a sound, while others hear a color, and some can even “taste” words.
The latest research on the topic has come out of Oxford University, where scientists found that people hear low-pitched sounds when they see large, round images. Experimental psychologist Charles Spence asked twelve “non-synesthetes” if they could identify whether an image or tone came first, in order to see how “soft” or “sharp” sounds registered in their brains. The volunteers associated high-pitched sound with angular shapes, and recognized low-pitched sounds when they were shown large dots.
In the same way, the “soft” or “sharp” sound of words are thought to enhance the taste of food. In a 1929 experiment, people chose the word “kiki” for the orange, angular shape and “bouba” for the purple, rounded shape. To add in a culinary element, researchers are now working with chef Heston Blumenthal to see how tasting words could lead to a new food language. The chef gave subjects two plates of food, then asked them to describe each in sounds, hoping their taste buds could evoke a synesthesia-inspired vocabulary.
People described brie as “very maluma” and cranberries as “very takete.”
So does this mean “yummy” still works for pizza?
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Image: flickr/ Empire Creative
May 29th, 2009 at 10:42 am
When I hear Ozric Tentacles, I see colors and shapes.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Sounds like a very interesting experience. I remember watching something on the Discovery Channel about this awhile back and I believe there was some research on how this condition affects their memory. It was shown, though I’m not sure how controlled the research was, that those with synesthesia had a higher than average recollection of events. Certainly not to absolute genius levels, but enough to make an impact upon the data.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
My wife is a synesthete. She was so excited to learn that other people experienced similar relationships. Someone wrote a book about it a few years ago that brought her attention to the condition. Her experience is expressed with numbers and colors having genders ages and love relationships. “9″ is the wife of a 44 year old dominate “Red.”
May 29th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Hmm. I don’t know if connecting personalities to numbers counts, I think that comes from Sesame Street. For me, 1 was a playful kid , 2 was a beautiful maiden, 3 was kind of an overeating jerk, 4 was a gallant idealist who wanted to marry 2, and 5 was 2’s domineering father. (notice the family resemblance)six was 5’s wife, 7 was a solitary beatnik poet, and so on it goes up to 100, who was a superhero.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Letters have their own colours for me. Doesn’t matter if it’s black script on white or vice versa: ‘a’s are yellow, ‘e’s are blue, ’s’s are leaf green… It’s handy when reading: each word has its own colour-scheme, so I can kinda gloss over the individual letters.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Except that A’s are really green and so are E’s. So is S. But O is white, P is blue, D is brown, and so on. I can often see the shapes of sounds, especially when I am listening to symphonic music. Someone put forward the idea that synasthetes invented metaphor.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:33 am
Too bad we cannot do this by choice! It would help learning and retention of information.
July 24th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
I have synesthesia with food/word relationships. As a child, I thought all people experienced language with taste. At age 32 learning Japanese, I realized that the connections were not being made with the new language (unless a Japanese word sounds similar to an English word). Also as I get older (52 now) a new thing started happening: sometimes the related word comes into my head when I’m eating (cottage cheese … “spelling, spelling, spelling”). Have changes in synesthesiac’s experience been noted anywhere?
July 30th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
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September 8th, 2009 at 10:09 am
ur fucking retarded
November 24th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
I have a word-food synesthesia and I don’t know anyone else other than my mum that has it. Any words that I hear make me think of different foods and sometimes taste them too (Lucy = ring-shaped jelly sweets, Mario = orange smarties etc… no sense at all!) Does anyone else this? And why do so many things make me think of carrots?? Lol. Some seem to make sense (I guess?) like fudge is obviously fudge, but chicken is actually potato snacks in the shape of chickens, being roast chicken flavour. Don’t ask me to explain, I don’t get it, I just have it.
January 7th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
I had instances of synthesia under the influence of hallucinogenic substances.
LSD would do it.
Hear a sound, or music, see a color or mix of colors…instead of what was right in front of me. It’s as if the optic and auditory nerves were crossed.