Julia Simner on tasty words and hearing colours

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Imagine if you were listening to an opera or a Taylor Swift concert, and as the lights in the auditorium dimmed, the music was accompanied by a rainbow of colours only you could see. Perhaps while listening to your friends talking, you simultaneously experience a smorgasbord of tastes, with different words evoking different flavours, maybe a delicious ice cream, or something as disgusting as ear wax... This merging of the senses is known as synaesthesia, and it’s the rich research world of neuropsychologist Professor Julia Simner. Julia runs the Multisense lab at the University of Sussex and has pioneered research into understanding how special brains process our sensory world in special…