Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds Patricia Lynne Duffy

What's a "synesthete"? It's a person in whom more than one sense responds when a single sense is stimulated. Research suggests that one in 2,000 people experience synesthesia; for Duffy, letters (and the words they combine to produce) have color (hence, Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens ). It took technology like PET scans to confirm the unusual brain patterns of synesthesia, but some artists of the past--Liszt, Rimbaud, and Nabokov, for example--seem to have experienced it. Duffy describes her own experience and that of several contemporary artists in examining this phenomenon as a special case of the "personal coding" scientists now recognize as a vital aspect of brain development. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved