ABSTRACT
The attempt to describe a particular sensation often, if not inevitably,
requires us to draw metaphorical comparisons with another sense, for
example, ‘a bitter, lemon yellow’, ‘tinselly, stream-like percussion’, and ‘the
sound of a trumpet is scarlet’, with the end result that metaphors of the
order ‘colour is taste’, ‘sound is texture’, and ‘sound is colour’ are pro-
duced. While these descriptions might loosely be called ‘synaesthetic’, they
are, strictly speaking, distinct from neurological cases of synaesthesia. In
neurological terms, synaesthesia occurs when stimulation of one sensory modality involuntarily triggers a perception in another, for example, con-
suming a certain type of food creates volumes of colour in the patient’s
visual field as evident to her as the furniture which surrounds her (Baron-
Cohen and Harrison 1997: 3). In contrast to this, however, my examples
above involve active metaphorical association.
