Colored Worlds

Gauracandra · April 1, 2002

Colored Worlds

Scientists Examine How a Disorder Makes Some See a Color-Coded World

By Lee Dye

Special to ABCNEWS.com

March 28 — Even as a child, the man called "WO" knew he saw the world quite differently than his friends.

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.

Condition Through the Ages

A decade ago Richard E. Cytowic, a neurologist, chronicled a number of case studies in a popular book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, and scientists realized the time was ripe to reopen the case of synesthesia. New testing procedures, and new tools that could peer inside the brain, identifying areas that are active during various conditions, could allow them to see if there really was anything to all this.

And it turns out that there is. WO really does see the number 2 as bright orange, just as thousands of others around the world see it as blue, or yellow, or whatever. It is a concept that is quite difficult for the rest of us to grasp.

"It's like trying to describe color to someone who doesn't see color," says Thomas J. Palmieri, a Vanderbilt University psychologist and lead author of a study on WO that appears the March 19 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In his earlier research, Cytowic documented a number of startling cases, including such well-known figures as Russian novelist Valdimir Nabokov, who as a child complained to his mother that the colors of the letters on his wooden alphabet blocks were all wrong. She knew, because she also saw letters as colors, and they clearly were not the same as those on the blocks.

The condition, which is genetically transmitted, seems especially prevalent among highly talented and gifted persons. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, who saw sounds as colors, even composed a symphony in 1910 that featured a colored light exhibit that he, no doubt, could see even without the lights. Other synesthetes, as they call themselves, include the poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud, painters Kandinsky and Klee, and the noted physicist Richard Feynman.

No one knows just how many people have the condition. Estimates range from one person out of every 300, to one out of every few thousand. The number is vague for obvious reasons. Some people learned early on not to talk about it out of fear of being regarded as odd. And those who have it tend to like it, so they don't feel a need to seek out medical help.

To take it away from them would be to deprive them of a special sense that may improve memory, and possibly stimulate creative instincts.

But do they really see, or hear, or feel what they claim to, or are they just fooling themselves?

Put to the Test

That is the question that Vanderbilt's Palmeri wanted to confront. He was in his office a couple of years ago, talking with colleagues and fellow psychologists Randolph Blake and Rene Marois, about a short item in a recent issue of the journal Nature. The item described some headway in the study of synesthesia, and it piqued their interest as students of the cognitive process.

Blake told his colleagues that another colleague, subsequently identified as WO, had the condition.

"We were really intrigued and started testing him," Palmeri says.

They wanted to learn two things: whether WO really saw what he thought he saw, and what part of the brain allowed him to do it. The first part of that question is the easier part. An answer to the second is still up for debate.

Since WO claimed that plain black letters and words appeared to him in vivid colors, the researchers devised a number of experiments to see if the perception claimed by WO was real.

They drew up a list of 100 common, one-syllable words, and asked WO to tell them the color of each word.

A month later they repeated the experiment. He got it right 97 percent of the time. The only time he missed was with the easily confused colors of off-white, beige and light brown. Other researchers have done the same experiment with similar results.

The Vanderbilt team then showed WO pages of black numbers. In one test, a few 5s were interspersed among 2s and he was asked to pick out the 5s. Since they stood out as a different color, he completed the task in a fraction of the time required for people without the condition.

Those and other tests led the researches to conclude that the condition was real.

Wires Crossed in the Brain?

Next, parts of the numbers were presented separately to each eye. WO didn't see the color with just part of the number. It took both parts to produce the color. So the color came only after his brain reassembled the parts.

"This strongly suggests," Palmeri says, "that his synesthetic associations take place at a central level of vision processing after information from the two eyes has been combined." Others have postulated that the condition occurs much earlier in the visual process.

Other researchers, including Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Brain and Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, believe the condition may result from "cross wiring" of the brain. Ramachandran, a pioneer in the field of phantom limbs, in which persons claim to experience pain and other sensations in missing limbs, notes that the area of the brain that detects colors is adjacent to the area that handles letters and numbers.

Perhaps, he suggests, people like WO simply pick up information from one mental data stream and blend it into another. But whatever the cause, Ramachandran and graduate student Edward Hubbard have carried out studies similar to those at Vanderbilt and they have collected convincing evidence that the perceptions claimed by people with synesthesia are real.

Which brings us to this question: What, after all, is real? Green numbers are green because they occupy that specific region of the color spectrum. If someone sees a number that is painted in green, and perceives it as blue, is he seeing the real world?

To a physicist, maybe not. To a cognitive scientist, maybe so.

It doesn't really matter anymore to WO. He says parts of medical school were a breeze, thanks to his synesthesia. All those long words in biology and anatomy that are so hard to remember came easier to him, because if he forgot the letters, he could at least remember the colors.

gHari · April 2, 2002

<h2>

What's so unusual about that ?</h2>

JRdd · April 2, 2002

Funny, I never really thought about it much, but I have also always seen the colors of numbers. I don't know if I see them the same way WO does, but I see two as having a yellow personality, eight as black, one as red, etc., etc. I also see numbers as having personalities, like eight is bossy, and two is happy, like that. They, like words, can feel a certain way, too. Words also have certain atributes not normally thought of, but I think I don't pay attention much to any of this, just like you don't think about breathing, or how you're touch typing, or anything else you do automatically. And this makes me think some people may have this ability (not disorder Posted Image ) and not actually be that conscious of having it. I myself do not pay much attention to it and don't know how much I perceive these things anymore. Maybe society conditions you to forget things like this, sometimes, jsut by the attitude of left-brain thinking and fitting into a world based on keeping the whole machine going, at the expense of individuality. Everyone has some kind of oddity or oddities. Just some are more acceptable, as far as their use in keeping those wheels running.

But I also get left and right mixed up, totally, have no reference point whatsoever within me by which to tell what is left and what is right, which the comment in the article about cross-wiring reminded me of. If someone relies on me to read a map while they're driving (which I'm good at) I have had to write an L on my left hand in order to give the correct turns. But this could be due to the fact that I'm basically left-handed, but was forced to use my right hand to learn to write, and even chastised at school for using my left hand with scissors.

As for colours and numbers, I used to dabble in color healing, and understood that even on a physics level, very subtle, that everything vibrates with different colors and sounds and feelings. Like it's all much more dimensional that meets the naked eye. At least that's how I understood it. So I don't think of it as hallucinatory, at all. But I find it very interesting, now that you mention it. The title really grabbed me.

Gauracandra · April 5, 2002

This topic is really interesting. Still would like to hear more about how people 'taste' shapes. One thing that jumped to mind was an issue of the Indiadivine newsletter regarding sound. It was stated that on certain subtle planes one experiences sound as color. Perhaps these individual's brains are attuned to these subtle realities and so perceive sounds (for instance) as colors. Also, it is interesting that you have the colored-number capability Jayaradhe. Kind of like a superpower Posted Image

JRdd · April 7, 2002

Ha ha ha. Very funny. Would be a super power if it helped me be more Krsna conscious. Posted Image

I just remembered that I had a color therapist in England, where color healing is much more accepted and practiced, and there is an excellent college for this, as well as some correspondences courses. Anyway this was a devotee family, and the dad was a dentist and a lot of the devotees went to him. The mother was a musician and she even did a book of music for Krsna (BBT sells or sold it for years, her name is Joan Wilder). And the daughter was the color therapist. She was a student too, and a very serious but warm and wonderful person. She would visualize certain colors and blow them softly through her mouth into different areas of my body. I could feel the difference in the colors and usually also knew what color she was doing (she would confirm this). It was extremely effective treatment, the most physically dramatic of which is not possible for me to tell here; it's a bit too personal. These subtle arts are a fact of life just as mantras were once used to hurl weapons. And even though I accept their existence, I still find them fascinating. Krsna's creations are just incredible.

ys, JR

Shashi · April 9, 2002

I was once living with natural healing woman who was quite old and she was being one colour threpist also I was overcoming the hepatitis from India and she asked me see in my third eye the deep red like cherry colour for the liver. So I am making one vizualiztion for you being as one suggestion by way of example only.

As you are breathing in to count of 4 imagine you are scenting something in Braj like the sscent of wet dust or the tulasi rani or even some floweres. Then hold the breathinh for a count of 4 and imagine that whatever it is you smelling has been touched by Lord on His walkings and rovings. As you are now breathing out imagine that the scent is the scent that is coming from His deep red dhoti which touched whatever you have smelled and let this colour permeate you liver for a count of 8 or more. Do this 12 times at leat 3 times a day.

I am hoping this example is not causing the offenses to your spirit but if cannt accept please try some other visual involving the deep red with the 4:4:8+ breathing cycals.

Let us all be the breathrens in the devotion.Jaya Hanuman!

JRdd · April 9, 2002

Hari bol, Sashi, thank you so much for this visualisation. I am going to use it, it is beautiful. Just the other day I asked a friend to give me a visualisation for something and she made something up on the spot, that suited me and the situation perfectly, and was also devotional. You seem to have that same intuitive and creative instinct. I love visualing but have been out of touch to some extent with my own creations, due to tiredness, which is why I asked her for one, and I just think it is so serendipitous that you offered this one. What a pleasing image!

your grateful servant, Jayaradhw