We highly recommend the New Yorker article on David Eagleman, David’s a natural problem solver. who was profiled by NOVA ScienceNOW this past season. While the article focuses on his study of perception of time, we think his research on synesthesia deserves special attention as well. In fact, that was one of our reasons for profiling synesthete Steffie Tomson, who works in David’s lab at Baylor College of Medicine. Our other reason is that we just think Steffie’s awesome.

It would seem that no amount of explanation could truly convey the unique way in which synesthetes experience the world. But for those of you still left reaching for what synethesia actually feels like after listening to Steffie Tomson’s fascinating descriptions, there is hope!

In 2001 Japanese game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi set out to create a video game that would allow anyone to experience the sensation of synesthesia. The game he and his team produced is called “Rez.” At first glance it appears to simply be an action game set in a virtual computer world. But in fact, it’s much more.

“Rez” is an experience uniquely tailored to blur the lines between the senses of sight, sound, and touch. Players can even chose whether they want the game to challenge them with danger, or they can select a “traveling” mode to take it all in unmolested. In lieu of gunfire and explosions, every event in the game produces musical notes that fall perfectly in sync with the electronic soundtrack. The controller also produces a rising series of synchronized vibrations; these build in complexity with the music over the 10 or so minutes it takes to traverse each level. While it’s a tenuous result, when “Rez” works the player can actually experience a unified sensation that’s wholly distinct from sight, sound, and touch alone. Synethesia!

For many years “Rez” was quite a rare game that only a few avid collectors were able to play. But today those of you who would like to dive in are in luck. The game is currently available for a modern console; it’s been updated to take advantage of HD televisions and is able to control the rumble of all four controllers independently. Even more exciting is that Mizuguchi’s next project, “Child of Eden,” will be in 3D and use hands-free motion controls. Hopefully it will help many more of us relate to synesthetes everywhere!

In reading further about synesthesia, which Steffie Tomson did such a great job explaining, I was taken with the lyrical—and sometimes just plain odd!—ways some famous synesthetes described their gift before we had scientific evidence for it or before it was widely known.

Olivier Messiaen and his very musical scarf! They often had to defend what Vladimir Nabokov, author of “Lolita”, called a “freakish gift.” “The confessions of a synesthete,” Nabokov said, “must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings.”

“This is not imagination,” French composer Olivier Messiaen insisted, speaking of the way his music came to him in what he called “colored dreams,” “nor is it a psychic phenomenon. It is an inward reality.”

Messiaen wrote about his synesthesia in his “Technique of My Musical Language.” “I am affected by a kind of synopsia,” he said, “found more in my mind than in my body, which allows me, when I hear music, and equally when I read it, to see inwardly, in the mind’s eye, colors which move with the music, and I sense these colors in an extremely vivid manner… For me certain complexes of sound and certain sonorities are linked to complexes of color, and I use them in full knowledge of this.”

In his multi-volume “Treatise of Rhythm, Colour, and Birdsong,” Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colors of certain chords. He described simple gold and brown chords and others that resembled purple rocks speckled with little gray cubes. He saw cobalt blue ones and deep Prussian blue ones tinged with a bit of violet, gold, red, ruby, and “stars of mauve.” With his music, he said, “I paint colors for those who see none.”

I thought I was an organized person until I met Steffie Tomson. Not only is her physical world covered in to-do lists (literally on her cup, the walls, and tabletops of her office), but her mind is the world’s best organizer. Just take a look at the instructional video in the player above and see for yourself! Yes! You, too, can be a synesthete!

Every number, day of the week, week of the month, and month of the year has its own color and location. The concepts that we know of as date and time are tangible things that have personality and shape. The rest of us have to buy iPads to experience our metaphysical world as concretely and colorfully as Steffie does. Come to think of it, if Apple could sleekly package Steffie’s brain into an iMind, I’d probably be the first in line to buy it.

“I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could…” Wassily Kandinsky

Who can paint pictures that sing? A synesthete, that’s who. In Kandinsky’s case, his colors and painted strokes set off sounds or musical notes. And sometimes the other way around, too.

Composition VII, No. 196, 1913. What do you hear? Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, but grew up in Odessa playing the piano and cello at a young age. He studied law and economics and lectured at the Moscow Faculty of Law.

At the age of thirty, he abandoned law and moved to Munich for art school. He studied life-drawing, sketching and anatomy, the traditional subjects for artists at the time, after not recognizing a Monet haystack. Kandinsky’s early style was marked by a liberation of color from defined form. When his teacher, Franz Stuck, told him that his palate was too bright, Kandinsky worked in black-and-white for a year, focusing more on form and less on the music of his colors.

Just as we were putting the finishing touches on Steffie Tomson’s “10 Questions” synesthesia video, I was paid a visit by my friend Robin. I’ve known Robin for close to 40 years and she has always been an incredibly visual person. In fact, she makes a living as a graphic designer. Here’s Robin. There’s a synesthete born every minute!

As I watched Steffie’s video, Robin peaked over my shoulder. When Steffie was asked “What color is Monday?,” Robin confidently blurted “Red” about a half a second before Steffie said “Red.”

I turned to look at Robin with an arched eyebrow. “Are you a synesthete?,” I asked her. Robin looked surprised.

“I guess so,” she said. “I’ve always associated letters and numbers with colors. I just assumed everyone did.”

Robin, welcome to the Synesthesia Club. You’re one in one-hundred!

As Steffie Tomson says in her videos, synesthesia is a harmless (and, in fact, often helpful) condition.

So why do researchers bother to study it?

Well, it’s a way to learn more about the brain. A lot more.

More synapses than there are stars in the universe. And while Steffie is deep into studying synesthesia now, her research interests actually extend further and deeper into how our brains work:

“Even if we come up with the answer for synesthesia, we’re going to have a lot more questions to answer, because we’re going to learn more about how those particular areas [of the brain] interact. And I think one of the things that’s really exciting for me is to move away from caring about how one area does one thing and another area does another thing… and instead to care about how all these areas work together as a network in the brain. I think that’s a much more realistic model for how we really perceive our world.

“I’m really interested in the question of how a child learns. So how do these network connections, these neurons, wire themselves up in a child? And how do they de-wire? Why are some children more talented at learning one way than another? What is it about a child that makes them a visual learner, as opposed to a child who is an auditory learner? What is it about the pathways that makes it necessary to get information in that modality versus another modality? Is it a factor of that particular network caring about visual input as opposed to auditory input? Or is there another area of the brain that’s overseeing all of those areas together… and it’s just listening more to one than another? There are a lot of different ways that this can be looked at. But I think that’s really an interesting question.”

Ya’ll have posted some really great questions!

I’d like to address one in particular that has come up several times, and that is the issue of whether or not my synesthetic colors “override” the colors I see in the real world. Specifically, if you show me a red “D,” do I actually see a blue “D”? I want to stress the important fact that synesthesia is an automatic association between a stimulus (like a letter or number) and an attribute (like a color). There’s no “d” in banana… blue or otherwise! If I come up to you and say the word “banana,” an image of a banana most likely pops into your head for a fraction of a second. It happens automatically, often before you can recognize it is there. If I show you a black and white line-drawing of a banana, you don’t see yellow, but you inherently know that the banana should be (and is) yellow. It’s the same type of experience for a synesthete when you say the letter “D.” For an instant, a blue “D” pops into my head in its proper location in my colored alphabet. A second later, the image is gone and I’m moving on to whatever comes to my attention next. If I see a “D” on a page, I don’t see blue, but I inherently know that letter should be blue if I had it my way. The blue is a property of “D” just like yellow is a property of bananas.

Unlike Steffie, I fall within the 99% of people who don’t have synethesia. All in all, it seems like an entirely friendly condition to have. As Steffie seems to suggest, there is no negative side to the condition, and I imagine she sees the world in a much more colourful way than the rest of us.

This is from us to you, Eoin! Although I don’t have synethesia, I’ve always thought of numbers in different ways. I imagine it’s just a mathematical thing, but I think of some numbers as being “friendlier” than others. Geeky I know, but hear me out.

For example, eight is a great number. First of all its shape; so curvy and continuous. What’s not to like? Then there is the fact that it’s an even number so it can be evenly divided. Four, of course, is also even but has a much less pleasing shape—all angular and awkward.

Synesthesia is a truly fascinating condition. All of the synesthetes that I’ve worked with assume that everyone sees the world as they do, and they can’t understand how it could be any other way! This brings up an interesting question about a person’s internal representation of their world. How do you know what I see? And how do I know what you see? That’s right… these are Steffie’s colors for “synesthesia.” We accept the world that is presented to us, and it is often difficult to imagine it “any other way.” Sometimes synesthetic children get teased because their colored letters sounds too fantastical to be real. But as a grown-up, it makes everyone jealous! In the end, synesthetes learn to use their colorful associations to help remember phone numbers and names, among other things, and that gives us a leg up!

Not only do synesthetes have a more colorful world, but they also most likely have something in their genes that makes them synesthetic. We have known for years that synesthesia runs in families, but the genetic mechanism is unknown. Although many synesthetes have synesthetic siblings or parents, just as many synesthetes are the only affected person in their family, leaving the inheritance patterns unclear. In addition to our functional MRI (“Sesame Street”) research, we are also searching for the gene(s) responsible for synesthesia. We focus on one of the most common types called colored-sequence synesthesia, or CSS. So far, we’ve found a region on Chromosome 16 that might be involved, but it will be awhile before we have a definite answer. In the meantime, we’re always looking for more families! If you have synesthetes in your family, feel free to tell me about it in the comments. We’re also always looking for synesthetes in the Houston area to participate in our fMRI studies. If you are interested, let me know.

As you probably know by now, synesthesia is not about memories that we connect with letters or numbers. It’s about associations that are actually hard-wired in synesthetes’ brains. And while some folks, like Steffie Tomson, experience their letters in particular colors, other synesthetes have sounds that are associated with each letter. Check out this very cool video for a demonstration.

I’m not a scientist. And I don’t even play one on TV (or the web, for that matter).

So I’d never heard of synesthesia when we started doing research on Steffie Tomson.

If you’ve watched Steffie’s videos, you know that synesthesia is a “blending of the senses”—a perceptual condition where the senses cross wires a bit in our brains. So the letters of the alphabet may be associated with particular colors, sounds may be associated with particular tastes or smells, and so on. Every day is colorful when you’re in a tree! These connections are very specific, permanent, and unique for each synesthete—for instance, “T” may be bright green for one synesthete, carnation pink for another, and midnight blue for yet another one. The particular color is a component of the letter for the synesthete. Non-synesthetes experience “T” as a vertical line with a horizontal line on top. But a synesthete experiences “T” as a vertical line with a horizontal line on top… and it’s ALWAYS a particular color—bright green, carnation pink, midnight blue. About 1% of folks are synesthetes, and you can find out if you’re one here. Now even though synesthesia is perfectly harmless (and, in fact, most synesthetes think it’s helpful), scientists like Steffie study synesthesia because it helps them better understand other conditions that are not harmless, e.g., autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD.

And by the way, Steffie doesn’t just study synesthesia. She plays one in real life.

So does Eric taste like earwax to you?

If that question makes no sense to you, watch Steffie Tomson’s videos RIGHT NOW.

Then come back and ask Steffie a question in the comments.

UPDATE: Steffie is taking a new approach to answering her “Secret Life” questions (and it doesn’t taste like earwax at all!). She’s already posted once and will post again this week (here it is!) to answer many of your questions en masse. At the same time, she’s answering the questions she doesn’t address in her posts in the more traditional style below.

UPDATE II: We are no longer taking more questions for Steffie. But check out her answers in the comments and in her posts. She may have answered a question you were going to ask!

Check out this preview for tomorrow night’s NOVA scienceNOW. It includes a segment on synesthesia, a topic that will be near and dear to your hearts starting tomorrow when we debut our new scientist, Steffie Tomson.

We’ll be premiering Steffie Tomson this coming Wednesday. And to give you a conceptual preview, oh beloved Secret Lifers, here are the Rolling Stones (if you don’t get the reference, watch Steffie’s 10Q video in the player above):