Synesthesia

I know of at least two people in my family who are synesthetes. My aunt, for example, always saw numbers in colors. This allowed her to entertain us kids by solving in her head complex arithmetic problems that we posed. Then of course she would make us actually do the arithmetic to prove she was right and to prove we could do the problems using numbers. It was fun.

I have always wondered why, as a child, I would swear that green traffic lights, or my father's green '58 Pontiac, were actually blue. Although I am not especially color blind, my whole family believes I am for that reason. Interestingly, green lights look green to me now. Alas the Pontiac is too long gone to look at again. It still looks blue in my memory though.

Boing Boing presents a remix of "Synesthesia," a documentary directed by Jonathan Fowler about people whose senses blend, or mix.