Sticking with my theme of blogging today about color/topics from cracked.com, a condition that sounds super cool/super overwhelming is synesthesia. In laymen’s terms, people with synesthesia can hear colors because of mixed-up cords in their brains.

There is an online community for synesthetes, and the author of the site shares his/her condition, as no two synesthetes’ perceptions are alike. The site’s author can see the colors of letters, and if that’s not the coolest sounding thing, I don’t know what is. 4.4% of people have some form of it, or 1 out of every 23. Now, I know more than 23 people, as does every else, and I’ve never heard of synesthesia. That brings up the question — how hard is it for someone to recognize the condition in themselves, to understand that the way they see things is completely different from everyone else?

My first link is to an article co-written by a synesthete. The anonymous author lists lots of pros and cons. A negative side effect given was to be driving in traffic, and license plates light up and flash as distractingly as can be. A pro, on the other hand, is that listening to classical music with one’s eyes closed has a similar effect, as the listener can see the colors associated with the sounds, and it’s its own light show.

As synesthesia is a mostly harmless medical condition, there aren’t any particularly important questions or experiments that need attending to. However, in a safe setting, seeing sounds is something that I’d love to do. I’m sure if they wanted to, doctors could come up with a way to twist nerves in the brain, but it’d be awesome if a hearing aide-type device existed to synthetically recreate the positives of the condition.