Synaesthesia: seeing sounds and hearing colors
If you think you knew everything there was to know about how your body absorbs information from the world around you, perhaps you’ve never heard of synaesthesia.
This is basically when the brain reinterprets (or misinterprets) the signals it receives through the eyes, ears, mouth or nose and kind of redirects it to a different part of the brain. The result is that people who have synaesthesia end up understanding colours as smells, or numbers as colours, or any other kind of random combination.
Although there are plenty of different kinds of synaesthesia, the most common ones mean that different signals are interpreted as colour. Some of the world’s most famous artists and musicians are synaesthetes, as well as writers and scientists. Many of them had no idea they even HAD synaesthesia, until someone pointed out to them in their childhood that it’s not normal to visualise the number ’5′ as a soft yellow, or to ‘hear’ C# as a clear royal blue.
Eddie Van Halen, Tori Amos and Nabakov (the famous author of Lolita) are just a few synaesthetes of note, and all of them describe the colours they see when they get a lyric, passage of music, or story exactly right: Something like the a clear vein of light, or a perfect blue… the kind of thing that lifts the spirit and makes you feel like everything is ok. Not a bad condition to ‘suffer’ from really is it?
Even Stevie Wonder hears sounds as colours, which is one of the most interesting things to researchers. After all, how can someone who is blind from birth ‘hear’ colour, and how do they describe what a colour is?
Franz Liszt, the famous Hungarian composer would actually give his orchestra directions in colours when he conducted them. Renting apartments in Budapest puts you in the same city where Liszt famously commanded his musicians to make their playing “a little bluer, please. This tone type requires it!” Confused the hell out of the orchestra for a while, but in the end it worked pretty well indeed!
July 21st, 2010 at 10:09 am
http://www.whattoseeinbudapest.com/synaesthesia/