Here’s another news item on the fun phenomenon of synesthesia. The results of a study done on a man, W.O., who sees colors when he reads and hears words (even when they are in a different language!) have been published (abstract here) and Wired News wrote a piece on it. The researcher, Thomas Palmeri of Vanderbilt University, verified that the subject was able to consistently associate the same colors for words or parts of words. Numbers took on different colors when they were written out instead of represented as numerals. “An image of the number 5 made up of much smaller number 2s, W.O. saw the whole image as a five and it appeared green” … “when he looked at the small 2s that made up the image, each of the numerals was orange.” It is fascinating to consider the richer experience W.O. has when reading the same things I do.