It sounds like something out of an X-Men movie: people who can “hear” colors. But according to researchers, up to 15 percent of the population hears colors, tastes sounds, and experiences various other cross-sensory phenomena due to a condition called synesthesia.
People with synesthesia (also known as “synesthetes”) have sensations like the rest of us, but also experience another sensation at the same time, says Daphne Maurer, PhD, a professor at Ontario’s McNaster University who studies synesthesia. For example, synesthetes may see a color when they hear someone’s name or get a certain taste in their mouth when they hear a particular sound. (The sound-color association is the most common among synesthetes.)
And scientists have proven the condition actually exists. “We know that this is real,” Maurer tells Yahoo Health. “Scientists have done brain imaging and found that, when a synesthete who reports hearing words in color hears a person’s name, the area of the brain associated with color is active.”
Research on synesthesia has been growing in the past few years and has found that synesthesia may have additional effects on how a person perceives the world, other than cross-sensory perception.
The most recent study on the condition, led by Stephanie Goodhew, PhD, of The Australia National University, discovered that synesthetes have much stronger mental associations between related concepts than the rest of us. For example, a synesthete closely associates the words “doctor” and “nurse,” but finds the words “doctor” and “table” to be very unrelated.
Researchers have also discovered that synesthetes have better memories and experience more rich perceptions than people without the condition. One small recent study from the University of San Diego discovered that synesthetes completed complicated puzzles three times faster and had less errors than people without the condition.
It may even be possible to teach yourself to think like a synesthete. Scientists from Britain’s University of Sussexdiscovered last year that people who didn’t have synesthesia could be trained to see letters of the alphabet as colors — and in doing so increased their IQs.
