Peppermint-taste marble pillar and colorful grass

By Dewi Anggraeni

MELBOURNE (JP): If, while entertaining some friends at home, one of them told you that the music you were playing on the piano smelled like burnt fish, how would you react? Would you try to remember what you had put in the fruit punch? Would you think that the new recipe of lentils and raw cabbage had been a daring experiment but a total mistake?

Then if your friend swore that what had been said was the truth, would you begin to doubt whether you are a good judge of character?

Chances are, there is nothing wrong with your character judgment because your friend is actually telling the truth. Being able to smell musical notes is only one subtype of a phenomenon called synaesthesia.

Another synaesthete may be able to see colors in alphabetical letters, different to the actual colors in which the letters are written.

Basically, a synaesthete can receive a mental sense by stimulation of another sense, hence the ability to smell music or see colors in people's moods, for instance.

Synaesthesia has been known of for centuries, but it has mostly been misunderstood. Lack of scientific research in the field led people to infer and make their own assessments, which would naturally be colored by their own prejudices.

The phenomenon, however, will soon be raised to a more socially "respectable" level. Anina Rich, a PhD student at the School of Behavioral Science within the University of Melbourne, has chosen synaesthesia as the topic of her doctoral thesis.

When she was an Honors student at Monash University, also in Melbourne, Rich and her supervisors established the Synaesthesia Research Group in the beginning of 1999. Their research has recently been published in Nature magazine. In an article published in The Australian newspaper on the topic, Rich and her colleagues put a small paragraph at the bottom, inviting people who believed they had synaesthesia to contact them.

"We thought we might get five or six responses, but we ended up receiving over two hundred," Rich recounted.

They then sent questionnaires to the respondents, which proved that most of them were indeed genuine synaesthetes.

Most of the respondents say that they have had the phenomenon for as long as they can remember. And of the different types of synaesthesia, the most dominant cases experience color stimulation.

The most common form of the condition is letters and numbers having colors, and these colors are not necessarily the same from one synaesthete to another. Often there is more than one synaesthete in a family, yet they do not see the same colors for the same items.

It is interesting to note the linguistic aspect of the phenomenon because, according to Rich, it is not the meaning of the word that denotes its color.

"As the colors are elicited by letters, this type of synaesthesia may have something to do with a development stage when people are learning language," Rich postulated.

The element of color features overwhelmingly in the respondents' reports. Curiously, a synaesthete's experience of colors does not interfere with the real colors of the actual items. They can see that grass is green, yet the word "grass" in its alphabetical letters, gives out individual colors, which may not necessarily be related to the color green.

Then there are those who see colors in emotions. "These are independent of the cultural colors, such as anger is red or black, or jealousy is green," Rich explained. "The emotional colors induced in synaesthetes are different and very individual."

Rich continued to explain that very little research had been done on that aspect.

In some respondents, sounds can also stimulate an experience of color.

Other senses involved in synaesthesia are gustatory and olfactory. One respondent reported that musical notes gave out odors. Another famous case study, MW, reported that certain shapes could induce tastes. For example, he gets a peppermint taste from looking at a marble column. His is one of the few cases of the mixing of senses that do not involve colors.

The stimulation of senses is mostly uni-directional. While a sound induces color, a color does not necessarily induce that sound. One respondent, however, reported he had experienced the stimulation in both directions. He cannot stay too long in one friend's sitting room because the deep-red curtain hanging there emits a high-pitched sound that gives him a headache.

Since publication of the research in Nature magazine, Rich explained, they have added about 60 more synaesthetes from around Australia to their large database. And in this database the gender ratio is six females to one male. The age distribution, however, is fairly even. Many of them are artists, graphic designers and musicians. There seems to be a correlation, though anecdotal, between synaesthesia and creativity.

Anina Rich is in the second year of her PhD. She is continuing her research, under her supervisor Dr Jason Mattingley and associate supervisor Dr John Bradshaw, with the assistance of brain scanning technology.

Using tasks developed for the study, the researchers are scanning synaesthetes within the brain imaging environment. This is conducted at the Brain Research Institute at Austin Hospital in Melbourne. They take real-time pictures of the brain, measuring blood flow within the region. They will then be able to localize the regions of the brain involved in the synaesthetic experience.

Synaesthesia is obviously a subjective phenomenon and, as such, there is a great deal yet to be explored. It is still a long way short, however, of fostering situations where nobody bats an eyelid when someone in the room shrieks, stuffing fists into ears, complaining about the loudness of the curtains.

Anina Rich believes that the phenomenon is cross-cultural, and would like to hear from people in other cultures, such as Indonesia, who have this gift.