My mind works like Google for images. You put in a key word; it brings up pictures. See language for me narrates the pictures in my mind.
I recited Pi to 22,514 decimal points in five hours and nine minutes. I was able to do this because of weeks of study, aided by the unusual synaesthesic way my mind perceives numbers as complex multidimensional coloured and textured shapes.
There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.
When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.
I collect art books. I have hundreds and hundreds of them and they get me to start hearing things. Sometimes people look at them, but I find that visual art gets me listening, gets me hearing things.
Music must be seen, and dance must be heard
Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.
I love how music can create an audiovisual experience. To me, some of the best music is the music that does that.
The way it works for me is my sight and sound senses are combined. Every sound I associate with a color and every color I associate with a sound... The way I see things is constant streamers across the room, bouncing off from every touch and every sound. Over the years, I've learned what color palates I love most.
Every time I hear sounds, I see pictures. Then, I start getting ideas. It just drives me crazy
See with your ears and hear with your eyes.
I want to make music three-dimensional. I want to make a song also a painting, and a painting also a culinary experience.
I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'
When I was little, my mum would take me to see the orchestra, tell me to close my eyes and think about the story the music was telling. I always spoke about colours. I'd talk about how purple the oboe was.
When I think of flavours, I think colour, so lemon should be yellow and orange is orange.
My first memory - at about four - was of numbers. The doctors who study me think a combination of mild autism and seizures I had when I was three have made me experience numbers the way I do.
Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.
I could smell colors, I could feel sounds.
I see colors like you hear jet planes.
I see music in colours. I love music that's black, pink, purple or red - but I hate music that's green, yellow or brown.
I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film.
I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.
I'd have these weird experiences where I'd just be walking down the street with this chord progression in my head, this happened more than a few times, and I'd walk home and find a fax in my machine and it would match the music in my head.
Maybe it's because I'm a designer, but when I am in a state of excitement, everything is so sharp and colorful and amazing, and I can look at blue and I see the yellow in it and the green in it, and the green-blues, the yellow-blues, so.
My algebra was relatively poor. I found it very difficult to use equations that substituted numbers - to which I had a synesthetic and emotional response - for letters, to which I had none. It was because of this that I decided not to continue math at Advanced level, but chose to study history, French and German instead.
