Uta Jurgens sees red whenever she swims the breaststroke. Backstroke is lavender, butterfly sky-blue. Jurgens, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, has a form of synaesthesia in which the mere thought of a dip in the pool conjures up different colours.
According to , also at the institute, the discovery suggests that the traditional view of synaesthesia as a phenomenon directly triggered by sensory stimuli needs an overhaul. 鈥淢ore and more research is suggesting that synaesthesia is not just triggered by sounds, smells, sights, or, as in this case, splashing around in a pool, but by the ideas and concepts that these sensory inputs evoke,鈥� he says.
In 2009, Hazem Toutounji, a national swimming champion for Syria, told Nikolic that each swimming style was bathed in a distinct colour in his mind鈥檚 eye. Jurgens, a graduate student of Nikolic鈥檚, and a keen swimmer, admitted that her trips to the pool, too, were awash with colour.
Advertisement
Book of many colours
To test their claims, Nikolic and colleagues showed Jurgens and Toutounji, plus a group of non-synaesthete volunteers, four black-and-white photographs of swimmers performing front crawl, backstroke, breaststroke or butterfly. Their task was to find the exact colour that the photos evoked in a book containing more than 5500 colours. A month later, Nikolic repeated the test. By assigning each colour in the book coordinates in a three-dimensional 鈥渃olour space鈥�, he was able to calculate that the difference between the colours chosen on the two occasions was 8 times smaller for his synaesthetes than for non-synaesthetes.
Nikolic then performed a second experiment, known as a Stroop test. His team showed the group the same photographs with each photo printed in a different colour. The subjects were asked to name the colour of the photo as fast as possible. Both Toutounji and Jurgens took significantly longer to name the colour when it did not match the one evoked by their synaesthesia.
The dates to 1812, when a medical student described the colours he saw when he heard music.
Since then, several forms of synaesthesia triggered by concepts rather than sensory information have been discovered. Some individuals associate colours with different days of the week, while others see the colours they associate with the number seven when presented with the numbers five and two together. In 2006, Julia Simner at the University of Edinburgh and Jamie Ward at University College London, both in the UK, showed that inducing 鈥渢ip-of-the-tongue鈥� states in certain synaesthetes floods their mouths with the taste of words they cannot yet say.
Nikolic suspects that all forms of synaesthesia are triggered in part by concepts, rather than sights, sounds or smells, and that many more forms of 鈥渋deasthesia,鈥� as he calls it, await discovery. 鈥淎ny concept, be it freedom, quarks or travel to the moon, could act as a trigger,鈥� he says.
, who studies synaesthesia at the University of California in San Diego, disagrees. Many forms of synaesthesia 鈥� such as flicker-sound synaesthesia, where flashes of lights produce sounds, and touch-emotion synaesthesia 鈥� where textures evoke emotion 鈥� 鈥渁ppear to be little-influenced by semantics鈥�, he says.
Journal reference:
