Olympia Colizoli doesn’t see the world like you. “To me, all time and numbers are arranged in physical space. Days, weeks, months, years, centuries all have shapes, and I use those shapes to organise my mental plan,” she says. “It took me a long time to realise other people didn't think in this way.”

Colizoli, a cognitive neuroscientist, experiences synaesthesia. Some people with this condition see colours, smells or sounds when they read words. In Colizoli’s case, numbers have a certain size, shape or other physical property. For example, people’s ages are expressed as a curved line. She also happens to study synaesthesia at the University of Amsterdam, curious to know whether she was born with her condition, or whether it was partly learned.

If you could teach yourself to see the world this way, it could potentially boost your creativity. Famous synaesthetes reportedly include Pharrell Williams who sees music in colour (and who told Oprah’s O Magazinehe couldn’t make music without it), and physicist Richard Feynman, who saw letters in equations as colours, and whose visualisation of quantum interactions won him the Nobel Prize.

But could it be possible to train yourself to see the world from a new, multisensory perspective? And if so, would it have the same effect as those to whom it comes naturally?