Synesthesia: seeing sounds, hearing coloursSynesthesia: seeing sounds, hearing colours
All In The Mind
For some people the number six is red and music evokes a range of colours and shapes. Seeing sounds and hearing colours is one type of synesthesia—where the senses are crossed. Meet an 11-year-old girl who was surprised to find out that not everyone sees colourful auras around people, and who feels that numbers have colours and personalities.
50:23•6 Jan 2019
Seeing Sounds and Colourful Numbers: Inside a Synesthetic Mind
Episode Overview
- Synesthesia involves stable, automatic pairings such as letters, numbers or sounds evoking specific colours, shapes or even tactile sensations.
- Eliza experiences auras around people, coloured and personified numbers, and vivid moving colours when listening to or playing music.
- Researchers suggest synesthesia may sit on a spectrum of mental imagery, offering clues to how all brains link concepts and sensory features.
- For some, synesthesia complicates tasks like maths, while tools such as a personalised coloured calculator can make calculations feel easier and less stressful.
- Studying synesthesia highlights how subjective perception is, showing that people can share language yet experience reality in very different ways.
“I can’t even imagine how it is to not see a sound. Even silence has a colour.”
What are the common struggles and victories in addiction recovery? This time, the focus shifts to another kind of unusual experience: synesthesia, where everyday sights and sounds pick up extra colours, shapes and personalities. All In The Mind brings together researcher Anina Rich, medical researcher Joshua Berger, and 11‑year‑old Eliza, whose synesthetic world is full of peach, rose gold and bossy number sevens.
Eliza chats about seeing colours shoot past her head when she plays saxophone, spotting auras around people and animals, and giving numbers distinct personalities: “Seven is not very nice. He’s sort of a bully… but six is like a mothering number.” Her mum, Rachel, adds a parent’s perspective on raising a child whose inner experience is vivid but hard to explain to others.
Anina Rich breaks down what synesthesia is, how common letter–colour and sound–shape pairings are, and why scientists see it as a key to understanding how every brain builds its own version of reality. She explains that for most synesthetes it’s “an unusual gift”, but in some situations—like clashing colours on a page—it can briefly feel disorientating. Joshua Berger shares how a fellow student’s maths anxiety led him to create a colour‑based calculator to match grapheme–colour experiences.
One synesthetic participant told him, “This is the first time that addition and subtraction have made sense to me,” hinting at practical ways to support learning differences alongside more familiar issues like dyslexia. You’ll come away with a richer sense that perception is deeply personal, that brains mix information in quirky ways, and that what seems “strange” from the outside can feel utterly normal on the inside.
If someone told you that Monday was blue or silence looked like white snowflakes, how differently might you think about your own senses?
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