The first time he felt like he could “ride” music, he worried that something was seriously wrong.

It was August 2008 and the patient, now in his mid-40s, had recently suffered a stroke. He was in his Toronto condo watching the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics when, suddenly, the high-pitched falsetto of the opera singers sent him on a journey.

“I felt myself get sucked into the TV set, transported through the wires, and wind up floating above the Olympic Stadium in Beijing,” he told the Star. “It was such a real experience. I could feel the heat and humidity on my skin.”

He was not transported to Beijing that day. But as he would soon learn, the feeling he experienced was very real. He had acquired synesthesia, a rare condition that triggers more than one sense at the same time.

Most often present at birth (famous synesthetes include singer-songwriter Billy Joel and painter Wassily Kandinsky), the condition is marked by unusual connections in the thalamus region of the brain. The result is a peculiar combination of senses: a letter of the alphabet can elicit a colour; a specific sound, meanwhile, can prompt a smell.

According to researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital, who detailed the Toronto patient’s case in the August issue of Neurology, his is the second-known instance of a person developing synesthesia as a result of a brain injury. (The patient appears in a series of YouTube videos which the hospital produced, but it would not allow his name to be published.)

His condition came as a surprise to researchers at St. Michael’s, where he was treated following his stroke. Although doctors quickly recognized his symptoms as synesthesia, they hadn’t realized that the condition could be prompted by a brain injury, said study author and neuroscientist Tom Schweizer.

Upon scouring the literature, they found the only other reported case, a woman in the U.S. who, after having a stroke, felt a tingling sensation when she heard a certain tone.

But the synesthesia in their patient, who tasted blue when he ate raspberries, appeared to be much more profound, even linking emotions to colours and sounds.

The St. Michael's Hospital patient, who wishes to remain anonymous, says raspberries taste like the colour blue and when he sees certain shades of blue, he tastes raspberries.

In their study, Schweizer and his team focused on the patient’s response to the James Bond movie theme song, which the patient described as sending him on “a ride that was cosmic in its voyage.”

To see what happened in the brain in these moments, they put the patient in a functional MRI, which shows the areas of the brain involved in performing a given task. Upon hearing the high-pitched brass in the song, “huge areas of the brain lit up,” Schweizer said.

Schweizer believes that when the patient recovered from his stroke, which occurred in the thalamus, the brain’s central relay station, the wiring got “mixed,” and linked “areas that wouldn’t normally be in direct communication.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

There is no treatment for synesthesia. But whereas those who are born with the condition can’t control it, this patient “is able to turn it off and on, and can enjoy riding the wave,” Schweizer said. “It’s a good trip.”

Despite the lingering physical challenges he faces, the patient said that if he were offered a pill that could erase all the effects of his stroke, he would decline.

“Say I taste raspberries, if they taste like a certain shade of blue, I know they are raspberries in their prime,” he said. “I get at least one extra piece of information.”

Read more about: