History of synesthesia research

Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled. For example, in a form of synesthesia known as grapheme-color synesthesia, letters or numbers may be perceived as inherently colored. Historically, the most commonly described form of synesthesia (or synesthesia-like mappings) has been between sound and vision, e.g. the hearing of colors in music.

The interest in colored hearing, i.e. the co-perception of colour in hearing sounds or music, dates back to Greek antiquity, when philosophers were investigating whether the colour (chroia, what we now call timbre) of music was a physical quality that could be quantified. The seventeenth-century physicist Isaac Newton tried to solve the problem by assuming that musical tones and colour tones have frequencies in common. The age-old quest for colour-pitch correspondences in order to evoke perceptions of coloured music finally resulted in the construction of color organs and performances of colored music in concert halls at the end of the nineteenth century. (For more information, see the synesthesia in art page).

John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) reports:

A studious blind man, who had mightily beat his head about visible objects, and made use of the explication of his books and friends, to understand those names of light and colours which often came in his way, bragged one day, That he now understood what scarlet signified. Upon which, his friend demanding what scarlet was? The blind man answered, It was like the sound of a trumpet.

Whether this is an actual instance of synesthesia, or simply reflects metaphorical speech, is debated. A similar example appears in Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding (written in 1704, but not published until 1764); indeed given that the New Essays is intended as a rebuttal to Locke, it may even have been the same individual. Although I˚jg.kjt is mainly speculation, there is reason to believe that the person Locke referred to was the mathematician and scientist Nicholas Saunderson, who held the Lucasian professor chair at Cambridge University, and whose general prominence would have made his statements noticeable. In Letters on the blind, Denis Diderot, one of Locke's followers, mentions Saunderson by name in related philosophical reflections.

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