Can You Hear Green Too?

Did you know there are people who can hear colors, taste sounds or see music? And interestingly it's not considered a disorder or a disease!

It's called synesthesia.
To understand synesthesia better, we need to grasp how our central sensory system works. In other words, we need to understand how we perceive things.

How Our Senses Work?

To understand the world around us, the brain mostly relies on five primary senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
The process of perceiving our surrounding environment involves multiple steps, which briefly go as follows:

1. Sensory Input: The first step occurs when one of our senses picks up a stimulus—such as light, sound, or another signal—from the surrounding environment.
2. Transmission to the Brain: Next, these stimuli are transmitted to the brain as electrical signals, ready to be processed.
3. Processing: Finally, the brain receives these signals and directs them to specific areas responsible for decoding and analyzing them. This is when we begin to understand what we're seeing or hearing.

It's clear that our senses only receive information from the outside world, while the brain constructs its own internal representation of that world.

How Synesthesia happens?

People begin to experience synesthesia when brain areas not typically responsible for processing a specific type of sensory signal become involved.
For example, signals received from the ears might be routed to regions that primarily analyze visual input, causing the person to see colors in sounds.

Interestingly, synesthesia is not a disease. In fact, every human starts life in a state similar to synesthesia. As infants, we experience sensory overlap, and over time, the brain gradually creates boundaries between different senses. This leads to the separation and specialization of sensory processing.

However, in people with synesthesia, these boundaries never fully form—even into adulthood. As a result, they perceive the world differently from most people. They might hear patterns, see music, feel temperature as sound, or visualize pain as color.

It’s also worth noting that synesthesia-like states can be induced by external factors, such as hallucinogenic drugs like magic mushrooms or LSD.

Is There a Cure?

There’s no treatment for synesthesia.
But don’t worry—most people who have it don’t see it as a problem. In fact, many even enjoy their unique experiences and embrace the weirdness :)

That said, they sometimes struggle to describe what they’re going through or explain how they perceive the world to others.
If that sounds like you, don’t worry—you’re not alone. There are online forums and communities where people with synesthesia connect and share their experiences with like-minded individuals.