Apparently, 1 out of 200 college students has synesthesia. One explanation for this is that synesthetes played with those colorful magnetic numbers and letters that, at least in my home, graced the fridge door for quite a long time. I’ve never asked my children if they see words or hear sounds in colors. I sure wish I did, so that I could have mastered Russian, Czech and Polish after just a few weeks!
Meet a polyglot savant, with a mild form of autism:
Tammet is a savant. As a child he had epileptic seizures. Doctors later diagnosed him with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. He mastered the world of emotions only through hard training. Numbers and foreign words, on the other hand, come to him naturally. He sees colors and shapes where most people see only plain words and numbers. He’s memorized the number pi to 22,514 digits. He knows instantly that January 10, 2017, will be a Tuesday. And he’s a fleet-footed traveler in the rocky terrain of languages. Tammet can speak Romanian, Gaelic, Welsh and seven other languages. He learned Icelandic in a week for a TV documentary, at the end of which he gave a live interview on television. He felt somewhat nervous, but was able to speak quite fluently with the show’s host. He even dared to make a joke in Icelandic, which is generally dreaded for its complexity. He still speaks the language today.
I first learnt about synesthesia reading the Instapundit blog.
UPDATE: Here’s a fascinating bit of information on synesthesia:
The history of the study of synesthesia stretches all the way back to Ancient Greece, when philosophers attempted to understand the chroia (what we now refer to as timbre), or color, of music and how to quantify it. Many eager investigations were conducted on the subject in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, until the ascension of behaviorism within psychology rendered the study of such subjective and internal experiences a ticket to academic oblivion. Since the cognitive revolution of the 1980s, however, there has been more and more study of synesthesia, bringing to light some exceptional insights into the functioning of the human mind.
While the standard wisdom is that synesthesia is rare and unlearnable, I believe the opposite is true: that it is latent (or forgotten) in everyone, and is learnable (with difficulty).
Here’s a blog I wrote on the topic:
http://jerroldprothero.blogspot.com/2007/05/learning-synesthesia.html
And I will disagree with my fellow synesthete Elsa: synesthesia can be quite useful for learning languages, used in the right way. I do not have Tammet’s level of skill, but I believe I understand how someone with a strong interest in language could achieve it.
For anyone who wants to know more, here’s an essay on synesthesia and language learning:
http://www.esnips.com/doc/31089b25-2f73-49d0-8ccc-07d9e938e7a7/Applied-Synesthesia-2005
I find this phenomenon(?), gift(?), so intriguing. I can see, so to speak, where it might become too intricate if you are associating the same words in various languages with different colors. I wonder: do you see blue when you think of the word “book” or when you actually read the word?
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Bryant, good to read your blog.
Elsa, I find this phenomenon(?), gift(?), so intriguing. I can see, so to speak, where it might become too intricate if you are associating the same words in various languages with different colors. I wonder: do you see blue when you think of the word “book” or when you actually read the word?
Thanks for the article; it served as a bit of inspiration for one of my own blog posts, which you can see at http://translation-blog.trustedtranslations.com/colorful-language-a-synesthetes-world-2009-03-27.html. Regards.
As a synesthete (person with synesthesia), I can fairly well say that Daniel Tammet, when it comes to languages, is an unusual case. I’ve read that most synesthetes (myself included) have more trouble with foreign languages, not less.
An example: for me, the word ‘book’ is blue. The French word, livre, is yellow-orange. It can be difficult to remember that book=livre, because they are such different colors.