Posted on 03/18/2002 5:05:06 PM PST by grimalkin
For one middle-aged man, "two" looks blue, but "2" is orange. And while "3" appears pink, "5" is green.
The man has synesthesia - a phenomenon in which printed words and numbers burst with color, flavors take on shapes and the spoken language turns into a mental rainbow.
For some people with synesthesia, say researchers, a newspaper is never black and white - it's red, orange, blue, beige, pink and green all over.
"This is an alternate perception," said Thomas J. Palmeri, a Vanderbilt University psychologist and the first author of a study reporting on the tests given to one man. "He is normal - a highly successful, intelligent man and he suffers no problems from this unique wiring of the brain."
The study, appearing Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explores multi-chromatic world of a man identified only as W.O. The man, a university professor of medicine, did not respond to requests for a direct interview.
Palmeri said researchers are starting to realize that W.O. is just one of a large number of people with synesthesia, many of whom take joy in this rich symphony of sensations.
"They often experience a great deal of pleasure from this altered perception," said Edward M. Hubbard, a synesthesia researcher at the University of California, San Diego.
For W.O., his synesthesia helped make learning the complex words of science easy - when the colors weren't distracting him from study, Palmeri said.
"He sees a palette of different colors when he reads and sometimes he is more interested in how pretty the page looks than what the words say," he said.
In the Proceedings study, Palmeri, Randolph Blake and other Vanderbilt researchers put W.O. through a series of tests.
Palmeri said that W.O. sees all printed words in colors, sometimes letter-by-letter and sometimes syllable-by-syllable. Short words have a single color while long words may have many.
When W.O. was given a list of 100 words printed in black and white, he said each one had a specific color. When the list was presented a second time, weeks later, W.O. gave most words the same color, missing only some that were either beige or off-white.
"These associations are highly reliable," said Blake. "W.O. says that the colors have stayed the same all his life and our observations lend credence to the claim."
In W.O.'s view, each numeral, except for zero and one, has a color even if printed in black and white.
When the researchers presented an image of the number 5 made up of much smaller number 2s, W.O. saw the whole image as a five and it appeared green. However, when he looked at the small 2s that made up the image, each of those numerals were orange.
When the numbers were written out - such as two - they assumed another color.
And the hues prompted when W.O. hears words are generally the same as those he sees when the words are printed, Palmeri said.
Hubbard said the experiments with W.O. match some performed in his lab that show synesthesians see colors when others see only black and white.
Just how W.O. perceives this color is difficult to understand, the researchers said.
"He tries to describe it to me and I still can't appreciate it. It's like trying to describe colors to a person who can't see them," said Palmeri. "How could you describe color to a blind person? You really can't."
Some researchers believe that about one in every 25,000 people has synesthesia, Palmeri said. Some studies suggest it may be much more common - closer to about one in every 200 people, Hubbard said.
One theory holds that the perception is inherited. W.O.'s mother, maternal grandfather and great uncle also experience synesthesia, but none of his siblings or children do.
Hubbard said that so little is known about synesthesia because many people won't admit it. Others, however, are surprised to learn that they are unusual.
It's believed that synesthesia occurs because some parts of the brain that perceive color are very close to parts to process speech, language and music, Hubbard said.
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On the Net:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org/
Synesthesia: http://www.ncu.edu.tw/~daysa/synesthesia.htm
Vanderbilt: http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu
Blue!
Forget the sound of music............Julie Andrews was doing a strip tease!
Man, Ozzy had this figured out decades ago!
I see the year as a circle, Christmas on top and July 4 on the bottom. Week is the same, Wednesday on top and Sunday on the bottom. At least this doesn't contradict operations on dates. I see numbers in a great line stretching from negative numbers to positive (I don't know if from left to right or vice versa, just a line.) The line turns a corner somewhere arount 100 or so and shifts to a logarithmic scale. Integers are bumps on the line. So are rationals, and algebraic numbers (different types of bumps.) No colors though. Nor do I hear colors in musical keys. (Assignment of colors to keys is not consistent across people.)
Undoubtedly, she'd see my shape as "pear". LOL. Glad she has been able to value her unusual abilities.
In our local paper there was an article about a woman with this.
What I remember most is that there was a number which smelled like cabbage to her.
I did -- thanks for the link.
I don't think so. They just "are." She sees people having shapes kind of like we see hair color. I remember when I was going to meet her first grade teacher my daughter told me, "She's a circle." I assumed she meant the woman was plump. After I'd met this slim, slight woman, I came home and had one of the conversations that over time I came to recognize:
"Honey, Ms. S isn't fat. I thought you told me she was round."
"No, she's not round. She's a circle. It's her shape."
"But she's thin."
"No, her SHAPE."
Pause.
"What shape am I?"
"Silly, you're a triangle, Mommy."
Eventually there were enough of these odd conversations that I was able to put it all together, and after doing some research discovered the phenomenon had a name. As I said, it hasn't really affected anything, although I do know my daughter finds it rather embarrassing now, and does NOT mention these things to people until she gets to know them really well.
Picasso, perhaps? He used some pretty interesting shapes in his portraits of people...
So these stay black and white? Binary?
Just seems to me, that people who experience this condition, have brains that are wired differently and are capable of different perceptions..
Your daughter must have been fun to live with because of her observations...I bet it made her childhood interesting and challenging to you...
I am curious, did your daughter talk about this with her teachers and playmates, and what did they think of this...this whole thing to me is fascinating...
Is this a newly evolved ability, or a remnant of an early ability from our proto-human ancestors?
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