Why Avi's blue, Bibi's pink, and Tzipi's in the buff

According to a paper given by a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a reference to synaesthesia ('synesthesia' if you're American) is in Exodus 20:18, where the Israelites' experience of receiving the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai is described thus: "And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking." 

I learned this from an article in the London Jewish Chronicle (22 June 2007) by a reporter who is herself a synaesthete.  Synaesthesia is a quirky but (to me at any rate) enjoyable condition in which a stimulus to one sense triggers another.  The most common form - which I have - is grapheme-colour  synaesthesia, where letters and numbers are perceived in colour.  Other forms include "tasting" words, "seeing" sounds, and "feeling" colours.  In the Jewish Chronicle report, for example, a man "tastes" ice cream whenever he says the Shema.  The reporter's mother perceives a particular singer's voice as "a clear, piercing blue" whereas the reporter herself perceives that same voice as "purplish red".

Estimates of numbers of synaesthetes range from one in 23 through one in 200 to one in 2000 to one in 25,000 depending on whose research you look at.  Studying the condition is still in its infancy, but it has been linked to creative people especially.  The artist David Hockney, the composer Oliver Messiaen, and the writer Vladimir Nabokov are examples. 

Many if not most synaesthetes are unaware that the "condition" exists.  Until I read an article in a Sunday newspaper about a decade ago, which described the novelist Shena Mackay as a synaesthete, explaining that (exactly like me) she "sees" letters in colour, and words in colour depending on what colour she perceives the letter they begin with to be, I thought everybody saw Daphne as green and Anson as blue, Saturday as yellow, Monday as pinky-red, Britain as pink and Israel as icy-grey.

Synaesthesia has been linked to high intelligence as well as to creativity.  It's not, of course, that every highly intelligent person has synaesthesia.  It's that synaesthetes tend to be highly intelligent.  Glad to hear it!  Still, there's a downside.  The kind I have, at least, has been linked to poor numerical and navigational skills.  Hmmm. That figures.  It explains why I struggled with maths at school and rebelled against piano lessons - much to the bewilderment of my dad, who was a mathematically-inclined musician. 

And here I wish to make a plea, on behalf of child synaesthetes everywhere.  It's only comparatively recently that educators have come to realise that some children written off at school as under-achievers because they were slow at reading were in fact afflicted by dyslexia - the British actress Susan Hampshire being a case in point.  Is it not possible, by the same token, that children who are slow at maths might in fact have synaesthesia?