WHAT colour is the letter A? It is a question Nicholas Root often asks the volunteers he has recruited for his research. Most give him the same response. "They say the task is stupid and that letters don't have a colour," says Root. But they do for people with letter-colour synaesthesia, in which letters and words are associated with particular colours. That includes Jennifer Mankin, now a synaesthesia researcher herself, who recalls confusing her schoolmates in her teens by saying one of them had an orange name. "It became clear to me, in that moment, that my perception of the world was fundamentally different than most other people," she says.
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