editorialgirl

I haven’t rambled on about synaesthesia for a while and haven’t mentioned it on this blog at all yet. So here’s a taster … if you’ll excuse the pun.

Briefly, synaesthesia (or “synesthesia” – without the first A – for our American friends) is a “condition” which means that some of my senses are a little mixed up. (I’ve put “condition” into inverted commas there because I still can’t quite bring myself to believe that not everyone has it.) It means that – for me, at least – letters and numbers are different colours, music and sounds have shapes and the days of the year stretch off into the distance on a rollercoaster-shaped calendar in my mind’s eye.

As a child I used to get ear infections a lot and often complained to my mum that I was “getting grey rainbows”. Looking back, I can see that the grey rainbows were just the visual representation of the sounds that my ears were making. I’ve since found out that my parents mentioned my “grey rainbows” to the doctor, who proceeded to test for head trauma. Not many people had heard of synaesthesia then.

I didn’t realise that not everyone made these associations until I saw a BBC Horizon documentary, “Orange Sherbet Kisses”, at the end of 1994, when I was 19. It started by showing some numbers and the voiceover said “… Some people think that the number four is green”. I was very puzzled by this because – as any fule kno – the number four is brown. And I don’t have some weird “condition”. Everyone associates numbers with colours … right?

Since then I’ve found more and more resources and information about synaesthesia on the web. For example, Cassidy Curtis from San Francisco has the same sort of “coloured-letter” synaesthesia as I do and he explains it really well – with FAQs and everything – on his other things website. He’s also developed a great flash applet which is the nearest to a visual representation of it that I’ve ever seen. (The only problem is that the colours he sees for letters and numbers are completely different to mine – and only another synaesthete could know how annoying that is!)

I’ve also been down to Oxford to take part in some research, where Megan S Steven scanned my brain using an fMRI scanner and asked me lots of questions.

And I’ve taken part in a documentary for BBC Radio 4 called Hearing Colours, Eating Sounds where I spoke (nervously!) about the colours of my alphabet.

If you’re interested in finding out more about synaesthesia, I highly recommend looking up Prof. V S Ramachandran, one of the leading synaesthesia researchers, who explains it in a very compelling and easy-to-understand way. Here’s the transcript of a lecture he gave in 2003 (I was there, groupie that I am).

Ramachandran explains that – as I suspected – we’re all synaesthetes, in a way. So of course I’m going to think he’s great.

Although my synaesthesia has faded over the years (I guess my brain has worked out which associations are important now and which ones it can safely put to the back of my mind) it’s still noticeable and I’m still fascinated by the whole subject. If you want to know more – even if it’s just “what colour is my name?” which seems to be the most popular question – ask away. I’d be happy to bore you with my views on it any time.