Tasting music, hardly needing sleep, no weight gain and superhuman endurance –it sounds like the results of a drug binge.

Taste the music
Imagine tasting or feeling music or involuntarily linking letters and numbers to certain colours. This kind of sensory mingling can be triggered by the use of certain psychoactive drugs. But for some people it is the result of a condition called synaesthesia.

The most common form of synaesthesia is called colour-language synaesthesia, which involves associating numbers and letters with specific colours. “8” may be red, “o” may be white, and so on.

Interestingly, the colours are usually not seen in the mind’s eye, but are projected outside the body.

Synaesthesia is involuntary and many people with the condition may not even know that their experience of the world is in any way different. Others hide their unique abilities because of fears relating to how others may respond. Yet, some would not have it any other way.

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, is probably the most famous synesthete.