Synaesthesia
In The Name of this Book is Secret, the Bergamo Brothers have synaesthesia.
Pietro Bergamo explains:
'When I hear the sound of scraping metal, I see a streak of bright yellow-green light. Screeching tyres are orange-red. Most bells are blue, although when I see the blue, I don’t hear the bells, I smell the soap.
'There was even a certain woman who needed only to say one word and I would see a dark grey cloud and then feel like I was drowning in the coldest lake on the Earth.'
Synaesthesia is pronounced like 'anaesthesia', but with 'sin' at the beginning. It's a real condition in which the five senses – smell, sight, touch, sound and taste – are mingled in some way.
Different people experience different mixes of the senses. They might taste what they hear. They might smell what they touch. They might 'visualise' that times or days of the week are images.
One very common form of synaesthesia is where the letters of the alphabet are associated with colours.
It's claimed that Thom Yorke from the band Radiohead has synaesthesia, and perceives music as colours. So did the painter Wassily Kandinsky.
People are generally born with synaesthesia and it runs in families.
Around 10,000 Australians are thought to have synaesthesia.
In 2002, the ABC Television program Catalyst ran a story about synaesthesia, including an interesting interview with twins Jennifer and Catherine Strutt. You can read the transcript here.
