German physician Georg Sachs described his own feelings of synaesthesia in a dissertation on his and his sister’s albinism. The first scientific reports on synaesthesia emerged in 1812 (Jewanski et al., 2009). Is JB’s profound memory merely incidental, or is it potentially linked to his synaesthesia? And, if that is the case, could having decent memory be one of the advantages of the condition? Are there other benefits to having synaesthesia? Before answering these questions, we must offer some context into how this fascinating phenomenon was first recognised as a psychological condition. JB’s mother tells me she didn’t realise he had synaesthesia until he reported seeing numbers in blue. When JB was three years of age, he was able to recall the script of the movie Shrek word for word. One example is JB, a teenager from New York who has synaesthesia and eidetic memory. Authors and artists including Nabokov and Van Gogh are also said to have experienced forms of synaesthesia.īut it’s not just famous musicians and artists who experience synaesthesia. Blige and Lady Gaga all claim to have it. Chromaesthesia is another common form, and involves the association of sound with colour – musicians Pharrell Williams, Mary J. Letters can represent different tones of colour, as can whole words. One of the most common types is grapheme-colour synaesthesia, which is when letters and numbers are tinged with colour. James’s lexical-gustatory form leads words to be experienced as strong tastes. There are over 60 known types of synaesthesia. It is thought to affect at least 4.4 per cent of the general population (Simner et al., 2006). Synaesthesia is involuntary, the different associations and senses generally remain stable over time, and associations are often unique to the individual. The word comes from the Greek for ‘joint sensation’ – as opposed to the more familiar term anaesthesia, which is Greek for ‘no sensation’. James experiences a rare type of synaesthesia, a condition in which sensory input from one cognitive stream gives rise to sensory input from another unstimulated cognitive stream (Cytowic, 1989). The word “Tottenham” tasted of sausage, the “Court” tasted of egg and the “Road” tasted of toast,’ he tells me. I liked Tottenham Court Road it tasted of breakfast. Bond Street tasted of a tangy aerosol spray. ‘Piccadilly Circus tasted of the peanuts and goo you get inside a Picnic bar. As a boy growing up in London, James Wannerton (below) would travel by the underground to school.
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