“A form of synaesthesia in which people experience letters or numbers in colour may be trainable. The discovery could shed new light on how such traits develop.
Synaesthesia is thought to have a genetic component, but some people have reported synaesthetic experiences following hypnosis, so Olympia Colizoli at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues, wondered if it might also be possible to acquire synaesthesia through training.
To test the idea, they gave seven volunteers a novel to read in which certain letters were always written in red, green, blue or orange (see picture). Before and after reading the book, the volunteers took a “synaesthetic crowding” test, in which they identified the middle letter of a grid of black letters which were quickly flashed onto a screen. Synaesthetes perform better on the test when a letter they experience in colour is the target letter.
The volunteers performed significantly better on this test after training compared with people who read the novel in black and white.
The findings suggest that natural synaesthesia may develop as a result of childhood experiences as well as genetics, says Colizoli, who presented the findings at the Forum of European Neuroscience in Amsterdam last week.”
Read more at New Scientist
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“could shed new light” – Oh dear.
Shame it’s not the cool music-colour form of synaesthesia.
My eldest son experiences this for numbers. He first mentioned this when he was under 5, on realising that it wasn’t usual. His maths skills are superb. I never realised that it had a name.
I cannot hear the word ‘Metropolis’ without tasting roast beef. When I was aged 10 to 12 we lived in Singapore. The Superman cartoon was on TV at Sunday lunchtimes so that is the probable cause – however, I am sure it was not on every Sunday of those years, or that we watched it with such regularity (once a week is hardly reinforcement is it??), and it is only with ‘Metropolis’, not the word Superman, or other associates???!!!
kewl idea; but if i’m gonna go thru all that trouble, i’d rather learn to play piano!
I used to describe different types of pain using colours. Is that common, beyond being used in a literary or metaphorical sense?
For example, tooth sensitivity is blue. Scratches are green-yellow. Most types of ache are blue, red or purple depending on where and how achy they are.
It really happened a lot when I was a child and lacked the vocabulary to describe a type of pain, or a change in the type of pain.
I was never sure if it was true synaesthesia or if I was just ‘labelling’ the pain. This article seems to imply that it could have developed into synaesthesia if I had carried on using that terminology to describe the experience.
Induced synaesthesia. Like mixing LSD and Salvinorin A. Not that anyone sensible would do such a thing.
Ah wow! Since I found out about synaesthesia I’ve always been hugely jealous of anybody who has it in any form, but I never thought you could genuinely develop it in the absence of a genetic disposition!
I think I’ll write go write a greasemonkey script for Firefox to change paragraph text colour automatically, and conduct a little experiment for myself. We’ll see if I’m a synaesthete a year down the line =)
I have had synesthesia for as long as I can remember I didn’t even know it was anything special I thought everyone did it until I was 12, my mother has it as well and so does my nan so to me it seems to be genetic not something you can learn, the fact that I was doing it before I even knew what it was also proves that it is genetic. But it would be interesting if this is true as it I would love to see how it developed.
I have synaesthesia, and have never associated colours with letters. For me, I always end up putting shapes and colours with tastes, smells and sounds.
I often wondered whether this was real, or just me developing synaesthesia as a better way to explain things, as it it gave me new levels of complexity, and nobody could ever say I was wrong.
I’ve always been intrigued by synaesthesia. I don’t think I have it but I have always associated certain words, letters and numbers with specific colours, e.g. days of the week – Wednesday is yellow, Friday is blue. My own theory is that I learned to read in primary school and though I don’t remember any in particular, I suspect it’s the colours on the wallcharts in the classroom that I recall when I read the word.
Mmm interesting this. I have a milder form (smells = Colours) and as I get older words that are associated with colours/ smells begin top crossover. My daughter has a very pronounced kinaesthetic association with words describing them as crinkly/smooth/ crunchy/ all whilst showing you with her hands lol might play with this see if i can make it bigger
Luke. As soon as i read the article i had a similar idea about mabye using custom style sheets or something… but I think your plan would work perfectly.
Unfortunately i dont have a clue about JAVA coding – that is what you need to be able to make greasemonkey scripts is that right?
If you make your script please post a link.
to me, the most interesting kind is when people associate colors with music notes. i’m a musician, so naturally, i find it interesting! I know a friend who can tell the key of a song by the colors he associates it with. It would be a lot easier to read and play music if you had colors for every note!
ok I have synaesthesia and i dont believe that teaching kids about COLORS IN THERE HEAD IS NATURAL! i take this very seriously and i dont appriciate what is happening. this used to be a disorder, now they are teaching KIDS TO HAVE A DISORDER!
Carl, why don’t you appriciate what is happing? Are you getting up set that synaesthesia is becoming better understood and accepted.(not being rude just dont understand why) I’ve have done a lot of reading about this condition and I havent come across anybody that really calls this a disorder, they refer to it as a condition but iam by far no expert on the matter. The only case that I can recall of some one having some problems is James Wannerton but even he says he wouldn’t change a thing.
I know there are millions of people that also have gustatory auditory synaesthesia and there’s a fair chance that at least one dont like it.
If you don’t mind me asking what form of synaesthesia do you have?
for a long time i’ve had a suspicion that derren brown has a form or synaesthesia which has proven to help dramatically with memory. i came across this article searching for “derren brown synaethesia” without having previously seen it on here. suspicious.
Mat, like you, I have just searched ‘Derren Brown synaesthesia’ because I also wonder.
In terms of the article, it’s interesting but I’m not convinced you could teach someone – certainly not ‘reliably’.
The fact is that (to me) the words, letters, numbers are inherently coloured – it’s not a mere ‘association’ thing, like ‘when I see the letter K, I think of a deep tealy green’. My letter R is also green, but a very different shade of green. C, J, and L are all shades of pink but very different to one another.
It is impossible for me to have ‘learned’ these from alphabet magnets, or similar – there are just too many shades in my alphabet! Even more impossible to have ‘learned’, some colours are actually non-existent. They ‘feel’ that colour but I can’t pinpoint them, even on a paint chart.