As a child, Julian Asher had a theory about the symphony concerts he attended with his parents. “I thought they turned down the lights so you could see the colors better,” he says, describing the “Fantasia”-like scenes that danced before his eyes. Asher wasn’t hallucinating. He’s a synesthete—a rare person for whom one type of sensory input (such as hearing music) evokes an additional one (such as seeing colors). In Asher’s ever-shifting vision, violins appear as a rich burgundy, pianos a deep royal purple and cellos “the mellow gold of liquid honey.”IT WASN’T UNTIL Asher began studying neuroscience at Harvard six years ago that he learned there was a name for this phenomenon—synesthesia, from the Greek roots syn (together) and aesthesis (perception). Almost any two senses can be combined. Sights can have sounds, sounds can have tastes and, more commonly, black-and-white numbers and letters can appear colored. For Patricia Lynne Duffy, author of “Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens,” five plus two equals green: her color for seven. Sound crazy? For most of the last century, scientists dismissed synesthesia as the product of overactive imaginations. But in recent years they’ve done an abrupt about-face, not only using modern technology to show that it’s real but also studying it for clues to the brain’s creativity. “Synesthesia is not a mere curiosity,” says retired neurologist Richard Cytowic, who helped spur the current interest. “It’s a window into an enormous expanse of the mind.”

Scientists have devised ingenious tests to prove that synesthetes didn’t simply invent their unusual associations. In a 2001 study, Dr. V. S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard of the University of California, San Diego, showed volunteers a display of black-and-white digital 2s hidden among 5s (illustration). Most people took several seconds to find all the 2s. To synesthetes, they popped out immediately in contrasting colors. “This proves that it’s a real perceptual phenomenon,” says Ramachandran. Brain scans are confirming the findings. At a Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans two weeks ago, Colin Blakemore and Megan Steven of Oxford University showed that a key color-processing region of the brain really is being activated in one synesthete who says he sees colors when he hears certain words. “What makes this interesting is that he’s been blind for 10 years,” says Steven.


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