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DURHAM, N.C.—Eben Alexander was your typical neurosurgeon. A firm believer of scientific reductionism, he thought that all thoughts originate from the brain. But this changed in 2008 when he encountered a case of near-death experience (NDE). As much as it was the complete opposite of his previous views, he couldn’t dismiss or avoid the case—it was none other than his own experience, and he had to face it and search for an explanation. Having contracted acute bacterial meningitis, which damages the neocortex—the part of the brain that is thought to involve complex cognitive functions like conscious thought—Alexander went into a...

We all link music and art, but only a tiny minority of us is aware of the crossover of senses in our brains, according to a UCL (University College London) neuroscientist, speaking today at the BA Festival of Science. New research has found that vision and hearing are inextricably interlinked in everyone’s brain, but only synaesthetes, who have a rare condition in which the senses mingle, are conscious of it. The results show that most of us prefer image and sound combined, rather than either in isolation. We also tend to agree on which images match particular sounds. This could...

A new exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky's work shows how the artist used his synaesthesia - the capacity to see sound and hear colour - to create the world's first truly abstract paintings. Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited with making the world's first truly abstract paintings, but his artistic ambition went even further. He wanted to evoke sound through sight and create the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well. A new exhibition at Tate Modern, Kandinsky: Path to Abstraction, shows not only how he removed all recognisable subjects...

By: Keith Varnum Some people see, taste, hear and feel things the rest of us don' t. James Wannerton tastes words: "New York is runny eggs. London is extremely lumpy mashed potatoes." Carol Steen sees every letter with a color: "Z is the color of beer, a light ale." For Carol Crane, music is felt: "I always feel guitars on my ankles and violins on my face." Other people experience smells when exposed to shapes, or hear sounds inside taste. And for some, numbers have color, sounds have smell, and words have flavor. Music is not only heard, it's seen...

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...