I've been intrigued by synesthesia since I read The Man Who Tasted Shapes sometime in the second half of the 90s. It seems so bizarrely wonderful: numbers might have colors, musical notes might also have distinct hues - or perhaps shapes... It's just freaky to imagine, and more significantly, it illustrates how seemingly arbitrary the brain's powers can be.Now Kottke points us to this post, which in turn quotes a Scientific American article about a wonderful phenomenon:
We also observed one case in which we believe cross activation enables a colorblind synesthete to see numbers tinged with hues he otherwise cannot perceive; charmingly, he refers to these as “Martian colors.� Although his retinal color receptors cannot process certain wavelengths, we suggest that his brain color area is working just fine and being cross-activated when he sees numbers…
Martian colors! That rules.
Is it wrong to be jealous of an "abnormality"?
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Track o' the Post: Bright As Yellow from Glow by The Innocence Mission, because I'm a little girl sometimes.