It wasn't only James Bond. Nine months after suffering a stroke, a 45-year-old happened to notice that the wailing horns in a Bond movie's opening credits gave him strange, ecstatic feelings. But any high-pitched brass instrumentals would do the trick. A musical segment during the Beijing Olympics gave him the same feelings. The man's doctors came to realize that when his brain rebuilt itself after the stroke, he had developed synesthesia.
Associating letters or numbers with specific colors is the most common kind of synesthesia. Other sensory combinations, like experiencing tastes when hearing certain sounds, are rarer. In some cases, colors, sounds, or other sensations may trigger emotions.
The recovered stroke victim, whom doctors and researchers at St. Michael's hospital in Toronto described in the journal Neurology, turned out to have more than one trigger for his emotional synesthesia. High-pitched horns gave him very good feelings, but words written in ...
