Apparently, 1 out of 200 college students has synesthesia. One can also learn languages seeing colors and numbers! An explanation for this may be 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!
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.
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.
Below is a video that provides a clue about this alternate perception.
Dum Spiro Spero 