'Music has taste and words speak in colours'

Sydney, Dec 28 (UNI) Ever imagined of tasting music or seeing colours in words! Well one in thousands worldwide are blessed with such extraordinary powers.

A Spanish research has examined a strange sensory condition which causes people to taste music or see colours in words.

The condition, known as synaesthesia, causes two or more human senses to act as if they are interconnected, and is believed to affect up to one in a thousand people worldwide.

''It is common for a synaesthete to see colours when listening to words,'' University of Granada researcher Alicia Callejas Sevilla said.

''There are also cases, although fewer, where people can see colours in flavours, others perceive flavours or experience touch sensations when listening to different sounds, and some link flavours to touch sensations,'' she added.

Ms Callejas looked into the most common type of synaesthesia known as grapheme-colour, in which letters, words and numbers evoke colours.

The survey found that synaesthetes always experience the same result for a given stimulus, for example, the word ''lion'' always appears red and that the experience was different for each person.

She said most people don't know they have the condition, and become disappointed when they realise it is something that is not quite right.

''When a person with grapheme-colour synaesthesia indicates that the word 'table' is blue, it is quite probable that if he or she ever sees the same word written in a colour other than blue, this word will appear to him or her as wrong and consider it a mistake,'' the Herald Sun quoted Ms Callejas as saying.

''The synaesthete might even point out that the word is ugly or that he or she does not like it because it is not correct, '' she added.

UNI