Interesting to come across this post at Metafilter.

Smelling Colors, Hearing numbers. This article from Scientific American seems to be turning heads around the Psychology Department at U of M [Michigan]. It's got me going too. I've seen real connections between color and sound before, stone sober. Could there be something to all this? [MetaFilter]

In the article above, the authors say :

"In addition to clarifying why artists might be prone to experiencing synesthesia, our research suggests that we all have some capacity for it and that this trait may have set the stage for the evolution of abstraction--an ability at which humans excel. The TPO (and the angular gyrus within it), which plays a part in the condition, is normally involved in cross-modal synthesis. It is the brain region where information from touch, hearing and vision is thought to flow together to enable the construction of high-level perceptions. For example, a cat is fluffy (touch), it meows and purrs (hearing), it has a certain appearance (vision) and odor (smell), all of which are derived simultaneously by the memory of a cat or the sound of the word "cat."

It was a Kandinsky painting that got me interested in this field.  What impressed me was the tremendous sensory fusion .. one could almost hear music in the splash of colour.  I'm no synesthete and nor am i involved in acid or mushrooms .... yet i felt the power of this piece. 

Richard E. Cytowic, author of 'The Man Who Tasted Shapes', in an article - Synesthesia: Phenomenology And Neuropsychology - A Review of Current Knowledge, talks of how this fusion is being used in art, music and theatre.

"By mid-nineteenth century synesthesia had intrigued an art movement that sought sensory fusion, and a union of the senses appeared more and more frequently as an idea. Multimodal concerts of music and light (son et lumiere), sometimes including odor, were popular and often featured color organs, keyboards that controlled colored lights as well as musical notes. It is imperative to understand that such deliberate contrivances are qualitatively different from the involuntary experiences that I am calling synesthesia in this review.

The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) specifically sought to express his own synesthesia in his 1910 symphony Prometheus, The Poem of Fire, for orchestra, piano, organ, and choir. It also included a mute keyboard, a clavier a lumieres, which controlled the play of colored light in the form of beams, clouds, and other shapes, flooding the concert hall and culminating in a white light so strong as to be "painful to the eyes."

Vasilly Kandinsky (1866-1944) had perhaps the deepest sympathy for sensory fusion, both synesthetic and as an artistic idea. He explored harmonious relationship between sound and color and used musical terms to describe his paintings, calling them "compositions" and "improvisations." His own 1912 opera, Der Gelbe Klang ("The Yellow Sound"), specified a compound mixture of color, light, dance, and sound typical of the Gesamtkunstwerk."

Rare condition or a state of sensory cognition to come?

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