Synesthesia

A sensation in one area from a stimulus applied to another part.

A strange condition in which the senses become intermingled. People see numbers in color or experience words as tastes. Almost any two senses can be involved. The most common fusion is of the visual and the auditory senses; for example, people see colors and shapes while listening to music.

Scientists have recently become very interested in synesthesia. In the past, the condition was considered to be a fanciful notion, in the same way as J. W. von Goethe’s Theory of Color (1810) was deemed to be a fanciful theory because it maintained that color, among other things, affected our morals. The Theosophical Society drew on many of Goethe’s ideas. It was the metaphysical side of Goethe’s ideas of color that the theosophists developed, stressing its clairvoyant and telepathic origins. A follower of the theosophists, artist Wassily Kandinsky, wrote a book called On the Spiritual in Art where he asserted that “colors had their own internal meaning” that could be “felt only by the more highly developed and sensitive observers.” Some “particularly sensitive observers,” he wrote, “can stimulate the response of another sense organ, an experience known as synesthesia.” By way of evidence, Kandinsky cited the case of a Dresden doctor who reported that one of his patients, another exception¬ ally sensitive person, could not eat a certain sauce without tasting blue. Scientists of the time thought this was all extremely dubious, but might have been less skeptical if the information had been reported in a less mystical way, and had come from a different quarter.