Mariam Nusrat Khan, Senior Secondary (Girls), Aligarh Muslim University

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   Ever noticed having a tendency to color the number 7 orange whenever the instance came? Like a green colored 7 seemed odd amongst its other multicolored mates? There are people out there who can taste shapes, some can taste my name and yours, while some can see colors in musical notes. Academic John Locke, in 1690, recorded a case of a blind man who claimed that trumpets (when played) sound scarlet in color. German physician George Sachs wrote of colored hearing. Francis Galton - cousin of Charles Darwin, wrote about visualized numbers in Nature, 1880. Such records surfaced for a while around the late 19th century, but soon fell out of public interest after the emergence of Behaviorism. Now these works have been revived over the past 20 years, and this peculiar phenomenon has fascinated neuroscientists and psychophysicists once again. Synesthesia is a neurological condition that occurs when two senses, say hearing and sight, merge together in the mind when they normally aren't. What this means, is when one sense would be stimulated, another sense would get an involuntary reaction. Synesthetes have their brains cross-wired in a unique fashion - when one sense is triggered, say a sound is made, then circuits associated with another sense, say gustatory, put forward a reaction. In other words, a synesthete could taste the shape of objects, or see colors in musical notes, even feel texture in abstract concepts such as time.
   Synesthesia appears to run in families and may be passed down from parent to child. Brain imaging shows that the brains of synesthetes have way more interconnections between individual sensing parts than normal brains do. Neurologists speculate that people who experience synesthesia are usually either born with it or develop it in very early childhood. The theory is that it occurs in people who have excessive myelination. Myelin is a substance made of fatty lipids and proteins which accumulates around neurons. It starts at 36 weeks of gestation and is completed by the end of the second year of life. The thicker this sheath is, the more efficiently electric signals are transmitted. This way, the brains of synesthetes have this unusual interaction between sensory parts that usually aren't supposed to interact. In short, synesthesia has two overall forms: projective and associative. In projective variants people either see actual colours, forms or shapes when the related sense is triggered while in associative type people feel very strong, involuntary intuitive connections between the stimulus and the sense that it triggers. One of the most common types of projective synesthesia is grapheme - colour synesthesia. Graphemes, which are individual letters and numbers, appear to be tinged with colour to people. Although different people have different associations made, the letter A is most likely to be red.
   Chromesthesia is another common type, where everyday sounds, music and talk can trigger seeing colours. Again, these associations vary from individual to individual. Composers Franz Liszt and Niko Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, both chromosthetic, often disagreed on the colours of notes. People who can see musical notes may also have perfect pitch because then they have a privilege in identifying different notes and keys. There are at least 80 types of synesthesia, maybe even more, but very less scientific analysis has been done for these. When synesthetes experience these sensations, they perceive it in terms of location. They mention about going to a particular place when they perceive these extra sensations. Synesthesia rather than a disease or disorder, is a gift for most in possession of it. Synesthetes have used their abilities in memorization of names and telephone numbers, mental arithmetic, and more complex creative activities like producing visual art, music, as well as theatre and poetry. Some studies suggest people who have it do better on memory and intelligence tests than those who don't. Four percent of the population has synesthetic capacities, a great majority of them particularly coming from artistic fields.
   Some famous synesthetic creatives include- musicians like Stevie Wonder, Mary Jane Blige and Billie Joel; visual artists such as Carol Steen and David Hockney. Writer Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography has mentioned of having 'a fine case of coloured hearing'. Musician Pharrell Williams has spoken as to how lost he and his music would be without his synesthetic capabilities. James Wannerton, also president of the UK Synesthesia Association, has got a type of synesthesia called Lexical- Gustatory Synesthesia. As the name suggests, he can taste words and sounds, and also texture. It's a full eating experience for him. The funny part is that whenever he receives any sort of sound, his brain is fooled into pumping acids across his digestive tract, to digest food that actually isn't there. James has used his synesthesia and created a map of the entire London Underground Tube, as shown, and each location is named after what the place tastes like to him.
   There is however one famous synesthetic creative who did not necessarily always consider this ability of his as a privilege. The great artist Vincent van Gogh mentioned in his letters to his brother how yellow and blue sounded like fireworks to him. In the modern world, he is considered a post-impressionist art genius, because his synesthesia has played a crucial role in the overall composition of his artworks. His admirers are aware of how important his coloured hearing was to him and his heart, but in his period, his synesthesia was just a characteristics for him to be declared 'crazy'. His art wasn't taken seriously. When van Gogh complained to his piano teacher about the colours the keys made, he was called insane and immediately kicked out. To finish off, here's a light-hearted experiment based on the concept of ideasthesia and such multisensory related research. In this picture, try to decide which shape would be named Kiki and which would be named Bouba. Almost all participants name the angular figure Kiki, and the rounded one Bouba.

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