Feeling blue?

Kate Spanos, a fourth-year cognitive science major, is conducting research that’s not for everybody. She only wants to talk to synesthetes.

“What color is the letter A? The number 5? Does your alphabet, or do your numbers, have colors?” she asked in a classified ad calling for volunteers to participate in her research project.

Synesthetes are those relatively rare folks in the population who, like Spanos, experience a combination of sensory perceptions simultaneously. The most common form of this atypical brain condition causes people to see printed letters or numbers in specific colors. In other cases, people sense particular shapes when eating or when hearing music. Spanos, an accomplished Irish dancer, “sees” colors in the rhythmic patterns of music.

“A reel has a different color than a jig,” she said, trying to explain the color associations she senses aurally. She knows non-synesthetes are hard-pressed to understand. Consider what happens for Spanos when presented with the word “zoo.”

“Z for me totally has texture. It has silver in it. Little square-ish waves,” she said, attempting to describe what’s in her mind’s eye. “The silver is on the tips of the waves. You can kind of see it sparkle.”

While the symptoms of synesthesia have been described in medical literature for more than a century, the condition has most often been considered a mere oddity. But with new technologies for studying brain function, synesthesia is garnering more attention for what it may teach us about memory, sensory perception and even language acquisition.

Popular magazines such as Scientific American have explored synesthesia, as has physician Richard Cytowic, who wrote “The Man who Tasted Shapes,” and synesthete Patricia Lynne Duffy, author of “Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens.” Duffy notes that physicist Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner, saw his equations in color; writer Vladimir Nabokov, poet Arthur Rimbaud and other musicians and artists all used their synesthesia to creative advantage.

Unlike Duffy, who didn’t realize until she was a teenager that not everyone sees letters, words and numbers in colors, Spanos grew up understanding her special condition. Her mother is a linguist and a friend of Duffy’s, as well as another synesthete. The elder Spanos understood that her daughter might have inherited the unusual trait, too.

Still, Spanos remembers being about 11 when she discovered that she and her mother didn’t see the same colors. “I remember her saying something about Wednesday starting off dark blue and ending up red and yellow. I asked her, ‘What do you mean, Wednesday’s dark blue? My Wednesday’s brownish orange!’”

Most of Spanos’ alphabet letters, like those of many synesthetes, are reliably consistent over time.

“A is yellow — a bright yellow. B is green — kind of darker than your average green. C is a very light pink. And D is powder blue. E — I have a lot of trouble with E. It’s either a dark purple, maybe like a navy-blue purple, or it can be orange. It seems to depend on the environment it’s in.” Her research reveals that many synesthetes see most zeros and ones as dark numbers, if not just outright black. “The letters O and I are most often white,” she added.

Spanos says her form of synesthesia creates an associated vision of color; in other words, she “sees” the colored letters in her mind. Someone with projection synesthesia, who actually sees colors in words on a page, will find the condition more disruptive to daily life, she said, similar to someone who experiences tastes involuntarily. For example, associating bad tastes with certain names or words “can be debilitating.”

Her current project grew out of her work as a research assistant in the perception lab of psychology professor Michael Kubovy. “I really like his research techniques,” she said. “They’re so clean and quantifiable.”

An Arlington native, Spanos came to U.Va. thinking she would study math before discovering the interdisciplinary cognitive sciences major. While her synesthesia work is not related to any particular assignment — “I’m just doing the research for fun, basically.” — she wouldn’t be surprised to find herself studying her intriguing condition in graduate school one day.