Download or read book Bright Colors Falsely Seen written by Kevin T. Dann and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a conversation with his physician, a nineteenth-century resident of Paris who lived near the railroad described sensations of brilliant color generated by the sounds of trains passing in the night. This patient - a synaesthete - experienced "color hearing" for letters, words, and most sounds. Synaesthesia, a phenomenon now known to science for more than a century, is a rare form of perception in which one sense may respond to stimuli received by other senses. This fascinating book provides the first historical treatment of synaesthesia and a closely related mode of perception called eideticism. Kevin Dann discusses divergent views of synaesthesia and eideticism of the past hundred years and explores the controversies over the significance of these unusual modes of perception.