Friday 17 July 1215-1315, Latitude, Literary Salon

Iconic intellects Wittgenstein, Nabokov and Feynman all shared the fascinating condition synaesthesia, where music can have colour, words can have taste, and time and numbers may float through space. As many as one in 23 people could have synaesthesia, but little was known about the condition until very recently.

Does having synaesthesia make people more creative, insightful or attractive? Can you acquire it if you haven’t got it, and can you lose it if you have it? Does being arty make you more likely to be synaesthetic? Do synaesthetes have different brains from the rest of us?

And would you describe rifle fire as black, or a frog croaking blue? Take a test and see if you are a synaesthete yourself.

Psychologist, author and synaesthesia expert Jamie Ward reveals how science is unraveling the mysteries of our senses, what happens when they become entwined, and how synaethesia is forcing us to radically rethink how our senses are organised.