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Synaesthesia - crossovers in the senses

Nabokov experienced colour with each sound, Kandinsky heard music with a splash of paint, both had synaesthesia, a rare neurological condition which causes the senses to intertwine



'LSD Art' on the cover of Life magazine
Synaesthesia, the neurological condition in which one sense automatically evokes another; so sounds have colour, and tastes have texture and so on can also be induced by LSD. Photograph: Yale Joel/Time & Life/Getty

The Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman reported seeing equations in colour. The artist Wassily Kandinsky tried to re-create the visual equivalent of a symphony in each of his paintings. And Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "One hears a sound but recollects a hue, invisible the hands that touch your heartstrings. / Not music the reverberations within; they are of light. / Sounds that are colored, and enigmatic sonnet addressed to you."

All had synaesthesia, a harmless neurological condition in which activity in one sensory modality, such as vision or hearing, evokes automatic and involuntary perceptual experiences in another, due to increased cross-talk between the sensory pathways in the brain.

"It's generally agreed that there's cross-activation, so that activity in sensory area A will activate area B," says David Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine, "but we don't know whether it's due to a difference in wiring or in the chemical cocktail." Eagleman chaired a symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego earlier this week, in which he and others presented the latest findings about the condition.

Once thought to be extremely rare, synaesthesia is now believed to affect between 1 and 4% of the population. Several years ago, Eagleman and his colleagues set up a website, containing a battery of tests to objectively verify synaesthetic experiences, and to date more that 9,000 synaesthetes have registered on the site.

Self-reports on the website

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