What Color is Saturday?

If you instantly knew the answer to that question, you might be a synesthete.

After hearing a professor discuss this term all semester long I pursued further study. The term "synesthesia" might be familiar to you from poetry classes. Some poets mix and mingle sensory experiences; they describe one kind of sense impression using words that usually describe another. It's synesthesia when Poe writes about "molten-golden notes," or when Keats calls a plot of ground "melodious" or speaks of "sunburnt mirth," or when Johnny Cash sings, "Somehow I learned how to listen to a sound like the sun going down."

But this isn't just a poetic device. Some people are born "synesthetes"--a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. This is a documented phenomenon that has been known in medical circles for at least 300 years.

Synesthetes don't intentionally mix sensations, and they don't "imagine" things a certain way--it just strikes them as a fact, for instance, that Saturday is red. That day will always remain, for that person, the same color. (But another synesthete might always see it as a different color.)

Some synesthetes see shapes or designs when listening to music; some taste words; some see colors when experiencing a certain taste or smell.

One famous example is Vladimir Nabokov, who as a small child complained to his mother that the letters on his wooden alphabet blocks were all the wrong colors.

Another example from my professor: When she is in severe pain, she sees the color orange; so when she was in labor, instead of telling her husband, "It hurts so much," she said, "There's so much orange." Furthermore, she explained that the color orange strikes her like a physical pain, and being visually assaulted by it for very long will cause a bad headache.

Researchers estimate that about 1 in 25,000 people are synesthetes. It tends to run in families, is more likely to occur in women than in men, and more in left-handed people than right-handed ones. Synesthetes tend to have excellent memories, but not so great math and spatial navigation skills.