Colour to sound converter / Nurnadia Nadira Din & Noor Zanirah Hamzah

With the help of sophisticated behavioral brain-imaging and molecular genetic methods, researchers are coming closer to understanding what drives the extraordinary sensory condition called synesthesia. The condition is not well known, in part because many synesthetes fear ridicule for their unusual ability. Often, people with synesthesia describe having been driven to silence after being derided in childhood for describing sensory connections that they had not realized were atypical. For scientists, synesthesia presents an intriguing problem. Studies have confirmed that the phenomenon is biological, automatic and apparently unlearned, distinct from both hallucination and metaphor. The condition runs in families and is more common among women than men, researchers now know. But until recently, researchers could only speculate about the causes of synesthesia. Now, however, modern behavioral, brain-imaging and molecular genetic tools hold exciting promise for uncovering the mechanisms that drive synesthesia--and, researchers hope, for better understanding how the brain normally organizes perception and cognition. Research suggests that about one in 2,000 people are synesthetes, and some experts suspect that as many as one in 300 people have some variation of the condition. The writer Vladimir Nabokov was reputedly a synesthete, as were the composer Olivier Messiaen and the physicist Richard Feynman.