My mother's name is the colour of milk. The strings of an acoustic guitar, when strummed, play the warm yellow of honeycomb. The sound is flat, hard and smooth. And Monday is pink. These sensations are always the same, and always present. This is synaesthesia – in my case grapheme-colour synaesthesia, sound-colour synaesthesia and sound-texture synaesthesia.
Like many synaesthetes, I discovered at a young age I had a flair for both music and languages. In music, it wasn't the physical act of performing I excelled at, but composition. I went on to become a composer for short films and dance theatre, and a sound editor for television.
Writing music felt a lot like a language to me, as I "saw" the colours of the sounds in a similar way. I also studied French, German, Spanish and linguistics – the colour of language helping me to remember words as well as the patterns of grammar.
Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon that causes an estimated 4.4% of people to experience the world as a cacophony of sensations. Around 60 different types of synaesthesia have been identified, but there could be more than 100, with some types experienced in clusters.
The condition is thought to be caused by genetically inherited traits that affect the structural and functional development of the brain. Increased communication between sensory regions in the brain means, for example, words can stimulate taste, sequences of numbers may be perceived in spatial arrangements, or the feel of textures might conjure emotions.
Frisch, who has grapheme-colour synaesthesia, sound-colour synaesthesia and lexical – gustatory synaesthesia – where words have taste – explores the world of senses through her podcast, Chromatic Minds, and is currently writing her first book on the subject. "Learning in school was too much for me sensory-wise," she says. "It is very difficult trying to solve an equation when all the colouring of a series of numbers was a psychedelic blast."
This explosion of colour, says Frisch, would cause her to lose focus and forget what she was doing.
It wasn't until she'd almost finished high school that she came across Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman's book, Wednesday is Indigo blue. "My initial thought was that Wednesday is actually orange – and I needed to get this book." This was a turning point for Frisch.
"I finally understood how my synaesthete brain is linked and wired. And I thought to myself, this phenomenon is amazing. I can use the colours to help me learn, rather than confuse me." Today Frisch says she can speak seven languages fluently – and learn any language she wants "with no difficulty, in a short matter of time".
Julia Simner is director of the Multisense Synaesthesia Research laboratory at the University of Sussex in the UK. She and her team tested around 6,000 children who were six to 10 years old. "We screened each one individually for synaesthesia, and then gave [them] a battery of tests to determine what skills come with synaesthesia," she says.
The study found that the children with synaesthesia were better in a number of skills than the children without – skills which, according to Simner, would "certainly help both first and second language learning".
"Specifically, they were significantly better in receptive vocabulary (how many words they could understand), productive vocabulary (how many words they knew how to say), short term memory store, attention to detail and creativity," Simner says. "These syn-linked skills predict that we might well expect second-language learning to be easier for someone with synaesthesia."
In 2019, another experiment led by psychologists at the University of Toronto, Canada, found grapheme-colour synaesthesia, where each letter and number has its own distinct colour, provides a significant advantage in statistical learning – allowing a person to "see" patterns – an ability critical to language learning.
For me, living life with a mishmash of sensations brings joy. Listening to music is a fully immersive experience. I sink into an ocean of texture, as if I'm under a soft duvet or submersed in cool water. The words of a book are not just inert ink on a page, but bring the story to life as they swirl around me. And language fills the air in a kaleidoscope of colour.