When I flick through my weekly calendar, a kaleidoscope of colour emerges in my mind. Monday is painted in plum, Tuesday takes on a lime-green tint, Wednesday appears in deep ocean blue, and at the end of the week, Sunday presents a creamy, buttery yellow.
No, I haven’t just taken a psychoactive drug. I have synaesthesia, a rare neurological trait in which the stimulation of one sense activates another, unrelated sense. For me, my perception of numbers, letters, words, and even music, are intrinsically associated with specific colours, transforming my mind’s eye into an ever-changing painter’s palette.
The word synaesthesia is derived from the Greek words “syn”, meaning together, and “aesthesis”, meaning perception. Colour associations are just one way the senses can be involuntarily cross-wired. Scientific studies have identified more than 60 combinations of synaesthesia; some people can detect a certain smell for each month of the year, experience a taste in their mouth when they see a particular number, or even perceive personality traits for different letters.
In a research paper titled Synaesthesia — A Window Into Perception, Thought and Language, professors Edward Hubbard and Vilayanur Ramachandran write: “Synaesthesia is a curious condition in which an otherwise normal person experiences sensations in one modality when a second modality is stimulated. For example, a synaesthete may experience a specific colour whenever she encounters a particular tone (e.g., C-sharp may be blue) or may see any given number as always tinged a certain colour (e.g., ‘five’ may be green and ‘six’ may be red).”
Another study, conducted by the University of Amsterdam and published in 2012, found, “The neurobiology of synaesthesia exhibits distinct patterns in both the function and structure of the brain compared to non-synaesthetes.” The study describes the defining features of the trait as perceptual in nature, automatic, consistent over time, genetic and present since early childhood. But what is it really like to live with this sensory phenomenon?
A personal fantasia
From a young age, I often fell into baffling arguments with friends over the shades of our names and the hues of our favourite songs (the Spice Girls’ upbeat hit “Wannabe” was undeniably sunshine yellow in my mind). I didn’t understand how they could disagree with what I believed was fact when, in reality, their version of the world was black and white while mine was drowning in colour.
“Synaesthetes often think that everyone else experiences the world the same way they do, or else they have been ridiculed as children and have not told anyone about their synaesthesia for years,” write professors Edward and Vilayanur. My perceptions have always felt so natural, so “real” that it was challenging to recognise my neural experience as anything out of the ordinary. It was only in my early teens when reading an interview with the musician Lorde that something clicked, as she explained how her sound-to-colour synaesthesia impacts her songwriting.
The singer has spoken several times about her experience with synaesthesia: “If a song’s colours are too oppressive or ugly, sometimes I won’t want to work on it. When we first started ‘Tennis Court’, we had that pad playing the chords and it was the worst-textured tan colour, like really dated, and it made me feel sick. Then we figured out the pre-chorus and I started the lyric, and the song changed to all these incredible greens overnight!”
Research suggests that about 4.4 per cent of the population are synaesthetes. Lorde is part of this natural-born club, which counts among it musicians Pharrell Williams, Lady Gaga, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder and Billie Eilish; artists Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney; and author of Lolita Vladimir Nabokov as members. The Russian writer best describes the sensation in his 1966 novel, Speak Memory: “I have a fine case of coloured hearing. In the green group, there are alder-leaf ‘f’, the unripe apple of ‘p’, and pistachio ‘t’. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for ‘w’.”
Connections to creativity
People with this condition almost always possess an abundance of creativity. “Synaesthesia appears to be more common among artists, poets, novelists and creative people in general. Why? What is the link?” Edward and Vilayanur ask.
A study published by the British Journal of Psychology, titled “Synaesthesia, creativity and art: What is the link?”, tested the relationship between creativity and synaesthesia by gathering people with different varieties of the condition and giving them psychometric tests of creativity. The authors found there was a significant tendency for synaesthetes to spend more time engaged in creative arts.
“Synaesthesia causes excess communication amongst brain maps … Depending on where and how widely in the brain the trait was expressed, it could lead to both synaesthesia and to a propensity towards linking seemingly unrelated concepts and ideas — in short, creativity. This would explain why the apparently useless synaesthesia gene has survived in the population,” the authors write.
Unearthing this parallel caused me to reflect on whether this atypical trait has guided my own creative life. From a young age, my passion for writing has never wavered and has now blossomed into a full-time career. Musician Pharrell Williams believes he owes his career to his synaesthetic gene. “The ability to see and feel (this way) was a gift given to
me that I did not have to have. And if it was taken from me suddenly, I’m not sure that I could make music,” he told Psychology Today.
Can synaesthesia be taught?
Scientists have known about the extraordinary condition for 200 years, though it’s only recently that researchers are beginning to explore the positive impacts the synaesthesia can have on broader cognitive function — such as enhanced memory, mental imagery and language processing.
Dr Nicolas Rothen, who is carrying out research into synaesthesia and memory at the University of Sussex, believes his findings could benefit the elderly population and even help people recover from brain injuries, if synaesthesia-like associations can be taught to those without the gene. “There is a theory that it may be protective in the case of age-related cognitive decline. There is evidence that grapheme-colour synaesthesia in particular leads to enhanced memory functions and we wondered if non-synaesthetes could be trained to have the same associations as synaesthetes and if it would lead to the same enhancements,” he says.
As such, several groups of researchers across the fields of neuroscience, psychology and psycholinguistics are attempting to train people in the art of synaesthesia. Researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland — who presented trainees with consistently coloured letters during short training sessions each week — proved that teaching people grapheme-colour associations can induce synaesthetic-like, automatic connections, but not a conditioned response.
Researchers in the University of Amsterdam study, which challenged non-synaesthetes to read texts with coloured letters, found a similar result. While they discovered that reading in colour is a credible method for a long-term synaesthetic training program, there is no evidence that the perceptual experience can be replicated. Dr Nicolas Rothen agrees: “We know that synaesthesia comes with benefits and that certain aspects can be trained. What we don’t know is which aspect of the synaesthesia leads to the advantage — the automatic association or the phenomenological experience.”
Your perception is your reality
On a dreary day in Sydney, I was playing tourist in the city when a light drizzle abruptly rolled into heavy rainfall. The closest safe harbour happened to be the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which admittedly isn’t the worst place to wait out a storm. Absentmindedly wandering, I was drawn to a 1919 artwork by Sydney oil painter Roy de Maistre, called The Boat Sheds, in violet red key. I immediately recognised his attempt at producing the sensation of synaesthesia within his painting. Throughout his work, De Maistre explored the power of colour to connect art and music. As the gallery’s plaque reads: “His compositions systematically represented music in terms of colour: colour signified particular musical notes, the depth and lightness of colour stood for pitch, and the varying saturation of colour corresponded with musical volume.”
Abstract artists and Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (who were celebrated for their use of light and colour in art) painted scenes as they perceived them. Rather than depicting how something looked, they painted how something felt to them in that exact moment — inviting audiences to experience the scene in a new way and, in turn, feel what it might be like to live with synaesthesia, where your perception is your reality.
I believe my own experience with synaesthesia gives me access to a unique realm of creativity and perhaps even a small insight into the minds of great artists, transcending place and time. For that, I am grateful. “If you ask synaesthetes if they’d wish to be rid of it, they almost always say no,” says Cambridge professor and synaesthesia specialist Simon Baron-Cohen. “For them, it feels like that’s what normal experience is like. To have that taken away would make them feel like they were being deprived of one sense.”
Kayla Wratten is a Brisbane-based journalist. When her head isn’t stuck in a good book, you’ll find her on the yoga mat, in a dance class or crafting inspiring stories. Find her on Instagram at @kaylawratten
