Chromesthesia: Hearing All the Colors of the Rainbow

<p>What color is a piano note? How loud is purple? What’s the brightness of a melody? If these questions are leaving you a little confused, that just means you don’t have synesthesia, a rare sensory condition that’s estimated to affect just one out of twenty people. If you do have it, then your answer to those questions might be very different from anyone else’s, since it affects each person in a unique way. Synesthesia means “joined senses” in Greek, and that’s exactly what it is: a mixture of different senses within the brain so that people can taste the words they read on a page, feel numbers as if they were building blocks, or literally see time flowing around them.</p><p>The most famous kind of synesthesia might be chromesthesia, a neurological link between sound and color that allows people with this condition to see each note as a separate color. The result can be both beautiful and a little dizzying to watch, and it reveals a deeper link between the senses, and between sound and light themselves, than most of us realize.</p><p>You can find a link on my blog to a short video from Great Big Story and chromesthetic artist Melissa McCracken as she shows us how she turns the songs she hears into paintings:</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbh7tAnwLCY" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbh7tAnwLCY</a></p><p>While synesthesia is a neurological condition that seems to have a genetic component, it isn't technically a disorder or a disability, and it definitely isn't a disease. If anything, it seems to help some of the people who have it. There are reports of "synesthetes"&nbsp; having better memory and creativity than average, and for people with chromesthesia, the ability to see sound can make them more successful as musicians or artists. Leonard Bernstein famously wrote about his ability to see timbre as color and would often notice and correct changes in timbre without anyone else being able to tell the difference. Some historians suspect Isaac Newton may ha