Do You See What I See?

(CNN) When Julian Asher listens to an orchestra, he doesn't just hear music; he also sees it. The sounds of a violin make him see a rich burgundy color, shiny and fluid like a red wine, while a cello's music flows like honey in a golden yellow hue. Asher, a researcher at Imperial College London, has a rare condition called synesthesia, a neurological condition in which people experience a mixing of their senses. People with the condition may see colors and movement in numbers, words or sounds.

(>>Don’t I know. Numbers, letters, words, sounds; they all combine in a garden of colors and a symphony of sounds. Yellow is a bright, sparkling flute and what I see in the written word “chemistry.” Purple, “15” and “Thursday” are all the same.<<)

As many as 1 percent of people have synesthesia, studies say. Researchers looked exclusively at auditory-visual synesthesia, the kind where sound triggers color. Brain scans have shown that people with synesthesia seem to have "cross-wiring" between brain regions: visual areas of the brain were activated in response to sound in people for whom sound triggers color.

When he was a child, Asher would go to the symphony with his parents and assumed that the lights went down so that everyone could see the colors better. "I mean, why else would they do it?" he said. I said, 'Oh, they turned the lights off so you could see the colors,' and they had no idea what I was talking about, and that's when I realized that they didn't see what I saw," he said.