Synaesthesia: How some of us experience music as shapes and colours and words as flavours

Do you experience sounds or music visually as certain shapes? Or perhaps you are able to ‘taste’ words or ‘hear’ colours.

If so, it sounds like you have synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon that leads to some of us experiencing a merging of different senses that are not typically connected.

In this episode we catch up with Prof Jamie Ward, a psychologist and synaesthesia researcher based at the University of Sussex.

He tells us about the varying forms synaesthetic experiences can take, what we know about their impacts on cognition and creativity and how it’s likely that you’ve met a synaesthete without even realising it.

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