In another case that the scientist calls ‘synesthesia’, every time a person sees a number, he/she also sees a colour. “Five is green, eight is red,” and so on. The latter is very significant as synesthesia is found “eight times more commonly in artistes, poets and novelists than others,” largely explaining their creative abilities, the scientist stressed.
A very cool discovery out of Caltech: auditory synesthesia. Synesthesia, you probably know, is an effect wherein the stimulation of one sense causes automatic sensations in another sense. For example, grapheme-color synesthesia is where numbers or letters appear to those observing to be shaded or tinged with different colors. Now two researchers at Caltech, Melissa Saenz and Christof Koch, have identified a new form of synesthesia, auditory synesthesia. To describe it, it's funner to read what Dr. Saenz has to say about how it was discovered.
Dr Ramachandran’s studies now show all these to be concrete sensory phenomena, whose neural basis in the brain has been pinned down. It gives an “experimental foothold to understand the more complex, elusive aspects of the mind,” he said.
Will this mean we will lose the great universal heritage of human myths and legends as the key to human behavior? Well, that may be another challenging study for this neuroscientist, who according to Newsweek is among the 100 most important people to watch in the 21st century.