Can words be tasted on the tongue? Can sounds be seen as colored shapes? Such questions are not hypothetical, nor are they psychedelic hallucinations. They refer to a well-documented neurological condition called synesthesia, in which the senses of taste, sight, and sound synthesize and intermingle to form a new sense or senses, which are a combination of two separate anatomical perceptions. Medical science does not generally deem synesthesia to be an aberration needing treatment or corrective therapy but describes it as a consistent and spontaneous neural response to external stimuli by which two senses are simultaneously evoked. In the very rare case of lexical-gustatory synesthesia, sounds or words can stimulate the sense of taste so that the auditory is imbued with flavor, the ear invokes the edible. The common form of synesthesia is chromesthesia, in which sounds assume color and can be visualized in chromatic arrangements of shapes and elaborate patterns. Far from being a disability, synesthesia of both kinds is often associated with increased memory, creativity, and linguistic skills. Was Marcel Proust an undiagnosed synesthete, who wrote his seven-volume, 4215-word monumental novel, Remembrance of Things Past, considered one of the great landmarks of world literature, inspired by the recollected taste of a madeleine cake eaten in his childhood? None of Proust's several biographers has made such a connection, but recorded synesthetes include vastly different musicians and composers, like Duke Ellington, Franz Liszt, and Jean Sibelius; writers and poets like Vladimir Nabokov and Arthur Rimbaud; and painters such as Vincent Van Gogh. Such creative geniuses and many others similar to them, whom inattentive history has ignored or overlooked, have experienced the everyday commonplace world in ways that are unique. They could see sounds as colors, taste the texture of words. What Aldous Huxley called The Doors of Perception, the title of his 1954 book, in which he narrates his experiences under the influence of mescaline, are widened when consciousness is enhanced, by the use of hallucinogens as in Huxley's case or through mental disciplines like meditation or by naturally occurring neurological conditions, such as synesthesia. Could some of those singularly enabled individuals whom we refer to as mystics, or sages, or seers, people who literally see the world differently from us, be synesthetes, or be endowed with any other alternative form of sense perception? The Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment while sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, the fig-like fruit of which is rich in serotonin, a neurotransmitter that can alter the way we feel and think. Was the Buddha a synesthete? Consciousness derives from the messages that nerve cells called neurons pass to each other through infinitesimally tiny points of communication known as synapses. There are estimated to be between 86bn and 100bn neurons in a human brain. Each neuron can have hundreds or thousands of synapses, making for an assumed total of 15tn conduits of neuron messages. The minutest of changes in this infinitely complex neurological system can lead to unimaginable differences in the way that we perceive the world. It is this single thought of the limitlessness that lies within us that can provide all of us with a sixth sense: the sense of wonder. Authored by: Jug Suraiya