Nabokov's synesthesia

The Russian author Vladimir Nabokov described his synesthesia in his autobiography. His mother first noticed his interesting visual perceptions when he was a young child and told her the colors on his blocks were wrong. She recognized that he had the rare condition because she too had synethesia.

Duke Ellington saw musical notes in color. Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman experienced it while creating the quantum theory. David Hockney said it helped him design sets for the Metropolitan Opera.

The first thing people ask synesthetes is whether they see letters and words in color on the printed page or on a computer screen. The answer is no because the colors are imprinted in the mind.

One synesthete recalls telling her mother about it, who then promptly suggested she get her eyes tested. Synesthesia doesn't work that way. Colors on the internal computer screen have been imprinted usually since childhood, and that person's colors almost never change over time.

While the most common form of synesthesia is called color-grapheme, where people associate colors with letters, words and numbers, other people may have other crossings of the senses such as hearing green and tasting velvet.

Synethesia literally means "joined sensation" and shares a root with the word anesthesia, which means having no sensation. Most synesthetes would probably describe having the idiosyncratic perceptions as far back as they can remember.

Synesthesia is not a new phenomenon. It has been known for about 300 years. It peaked as a scientific focus around the turn of the 20th century. After decades of declining interest, it is now being studied throughout the world. Part of the renewed interest is due to the fact that synesthetes use the Internet to discover more about it and talk to each other about their experiences.

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