The word “Monday” is pink to Helen Besgrove – a pink watercolour wash. For her identical twin, Kirsty Neal, it’s red – specifically, red fading to brown. In her mind’s eye, Helen sees the letter A as black with a white line through it. Kirsty sees A as yellow with patches of white.
What is synaesthesia? How do synaesthetes experience life? And how do they put this rare trait to use?German physician Georg Sachs noticed something about himself as he sat writing one day in 1812. He saw things differently. The alphabet, for example, conjured very specific colours: A was cinnabar, C was pale ash. “These introduce themselves to the mind as if a series of visible objects in dark space,” he wrote, in theby people who saw sequences of numbers in “long vistas” and curves.
As a seven-year-old, Carol Steen was walking home from school one day when she told her best friend the letter A was “the prettiest pink I’d ever seen”. Her friend stopped, gave her a piercing look, and said, “You’re weird.” They never spoke again. At 20, Steen told her father the number five was yellow. “And my father said, ‘No, it’s yellow.’” He was the only other person she knew who saw colours, but he was reticent to speak about it. “I didn’t get another peep out of him for 30 years.
According to one school of thought, people with synaesthesia have different connections than most people between parts of the brain responsible for, say, processing sound or colour perception. If that were so, some researchers believe synaesthesia might be linked to a process called synaptic pruning: babies have more brain connections than adults, which, as they experience the world, are “pruned”.
When Smith sees a phone number, he experiences strong colours; triples of the number six, for example, will evoke a lot of purple. He codes documents accordingly. “For me, a number has to correspond to the colour that gets assigned. Otherwise, it’s just a bit distressing to look at this list and see all these twos and have it not be blue.” Mostly, though, he’s sanguine about his sensory crossover: “It’s a natural variation, it’s a trait. It doesn’t cause any problems.
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