Colored Worlds

[andyjackson1828]

Letters, numbers and words all had distinct colors.

He knew it, because he could see it with his own eyes. To him, a page of black print didn't look black at all. It was a symphony of color. The number "2" was bright orange, "5" was green, and so forth.

His young friends, no doubt, thought he was a bit nutty, but he had one close ally. His mother understood. She knew words had colors, because she, too, could see them. They weren't the same colors her son saw, but they were colors, nonetheless.

Both WO (as he is anonymously referred to in a recent study) and his mother had a condition known as synesthesia (rhymes with anesthesia), that causes some people to hear colors, feel sounds and taste shapes. Scientists have known about synesthesia for at least 300 years, but it wasn't taken all that seriously until recently. People who claimed to hear colors were dismissed as hallucinatory, or worse.




This is really wild!

The rest at...

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DyeHard/dyehard020328.html

[On the Road]

1. I Knew a Woman -- a Philosophy Professor, in Fact,

who associated numbers and colors since her early childhood. The number 2, for example, HAD to be blue. A brown 2 just looked offensive.

Her brother had done the same thing. Up to a certain point, their systems agreed, but for higher numbers it broke down.

Don't know what it means, and I don't even know if it's synesthesia, but it sounds like the article. They are certainly not making it up.

[gypsy11]

2. It is really wild!

Thanks for the post! :)