“Where is my cyanometer,” Thoreau exclaimed in his journal on a blue-skied spring day, referring to the curious device invented by the Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure a century earlier to measure the blueness of the sky.
Here are some of the most beautiful meditations on blue from 200 years of literature, including Thoreau, Goethe, Toni Morrison, Rachel Carson, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Solnit, Georgia O'Keeffe, and other titans of the world in words.
The standard theory is that synesthesia results from random over-wiring between brain areas—in this case, between regions that process letters and those that process color. This model of random connectivity predicts that each synesthete’s color associations will be different: Sue might have a yellow “B” while Tom’s “B” is red.
However, a suspicion about the standard model arose in 2006, when two Stanford scientists, Drs. Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer, found a synesthete whose colors had a distinctive pattern, cycling through red, orange, yellow, green and blue. When asked about the pattern, the synesthete pointed out that her colors matched those on the popular Fisher Price magnet set she had as a child—in which A is red, B is orange, C is yellow, D is green, and so on. By 2013, Winawer and Witthoft had found 10 more synesthetes whose colors echoed the Fisher Price magnet set.
Fascinating new research sheds light on the role of the environment in synesthesia, one of the most remarkable neurological phenomena.
Complement with synesthetic savant Daniel Tammet on synesthesia and the poetry of numbers.