- [Narrator] Funding for the Secret Life of Scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation.
(light piano intro) - Okay, synesthesia is a perceptual condition that involves blending of the senses.
So letters can get associated with colors or tastes with shapes, that kind of thing.
We think that it arises because of abnormal neural connectivity.
And we care about this because we're looking at synesthesia as a model for other diseases that have been implicated in abnormal connectivity, such as autism, schizophrenia, ADD and that kind of thing.
Under time, sweet.
(laughing) (chiming intro) (light piano music) Okay, so synesthesia.
S is red, pale yellow, green, blue, red again, yellow, orange, blue, red, black, and A is red.
I remember a vague instance in like second grade.
I was thinking through how to spell a word and I remember associating some letter with yellow.
I'm guessing it's T because that's what it is for me now.
And I remember someone saying, what do you mean yellow?
What does that have to do with anything?
We're studying, like focus here.
I just thought, oh, well, nobody else sees that so I should just stop talking.
So I was in college and I saw a flyer that had synesthesia and of course every single letter had a different color and they were all wrong.
What is wrong with this poster?
And so then of course I read it and I thought, oh, I really do have that and it never really occurred to me before and it was kind of neat to know that someone cared about it, I guess.
So I called the number and said, hey, I'm a synesthete it turns out.
I came in and I did some experiments and I said, hey, this is really cool.
If you ever need help sometime, let me know.
And he said, sure.
I think I'm the only person I know that's researching synesthesia that also has it.
One participant that came in, she had just found out that she had synesthesia.
She was so excited about it and she kept talking about her experiences and I sort of nodded along like it made perfect sense and she was like, you're the only person that nods like that.
And I said, well, I have it so I know exactly what you're talking about.
She said, I can't believe it.
I can't believe it.
I can't believe everyone doesn't see the world this way.
She was just bubbling with excitement and even coming out of the scanner.
It's really kind of neat because I feel like I get all this extra information that they wouldn't have told someone else because a non-synesthete doesn't really understand.
I would hate to not be a synesthete anymore.
It doesn't make any sense to me how a person can think about an alphabet without having brilliant colors.
It seems like it would be really boring.
(light piano music) So synesthesia is a perceptual condition that's completely harmless.
We sort of call it a blending of the senses.
So you have letters associated with colors and music associated with colors and tastes associated with shapes, all kinds of great sensory interplay going on.
Synesthesia is not a memory.
It's more of sort of an automatic binding.
So purple becomes a property of J.
One synesthete that we have worked with, she has these automatic associations between letters and colors.
She's also an editor for a newspaper and she uses her colors to help her spell check.
If cap has the wrong three colors in it, then it's misspelled.
Another synesthete that we've talked to, letters induce not only a color for him but also a taste.
One of his good friends is named Eric.
He hates saying the name because apparently the taste of Eric is like ear wax to him.
So we use functional MRI to look at synesthetes brains.
We show them a 12 minute clip of Sesame Street that's in black and white because we don't want the people to be seeing color.
And what we're looking for is to see how the color areas and the letter areas are active.
The reason that we are studying synesthesia is because synesthesia is an example of how abnormal network connections can form such as autism, schizophrenia, ADD.
So if we can understand how this is happening in a harmless condition, then maybe we can understand what's gone wrong in a harmful disease.
Science is sort of like exploring for your job.
(light piano music) It's essentially a blending of different sensory modalities so that a stimulus in one sensory modality elicits an association within another.
B, it's bright orange, it's just happier than A.
About 1%.
So Monday's here.
As I move to Tuesday, I'll be here and Monday will be there and I'll remember what I did on Monday, which was be here and I'll remember what I did on Sunday, which is there.
Kandinsky, perhaps is a pretty famous synesthete.
Bill Nye the Science Guy.
I really loved him.
He was great.
- [Announcer] Bill Nye The Science Guy.
- The day that I realized my data was real.
I wasn't convinced that my data was actually representative of what was really going on and I realized that it was, and it was just so exciting.
I think Bert, just 'cause I think I would really like to see him in hats.
He would look better in hats than Ernie would.
Zero is here and I go zero through 10 and then kind of in a diagonal up to 20.
And then at 20, it kind of shoots off into the distance for all the other numbers that I could possibly ever use.
I don't wanna pick out a favorite.
That would be rude.
(light outro chime)
