Violets smell red
Roses smell blue
Sugar sounds loud
And, boy, I’m confu …

… sed

(Somebody stop me!!! If a criminal commits crimes, then I must be a rhyminal.)

First, I like the redesign. It’s bright and fresh. Now for my limerick about synesthesia:

> I think I have synesthesia
> As well as a touch of amnesia
> My perfume smells blue
> My sweat socks do, too
> And I still think Zimbabwe’s Rhodesia

I like the redesign of your site!

As for smelling colors, my view is that most people can associate smells with colors, to a greater or lesser degree. I’ve published two papers about this in the American Journal of Psychology. In one method, we had people rate smells using a list of color names. In the other, we had them point to actual color samples. Either way, different smells produced different color profiles.

Is this “simply” an effect of linguistic association? I don’t think so—we used some fragrance materials that most people haven’t encountered before and still we found reliable color profiles.

We also found that as we increased the concentration of a given smell, the associated color became darker; in Munsell-system color jargon the hue stayed the same but the lightness changed. (Conversely, a weaker version of an odor produces a more pastel color impression.) So color-odor relationships are more than just color matches—odor intensity correlates with color lightness in a systematic way.

Clearly, this puts me at odds with Richard Cytowic. His perspective is clinical neurology, and there may well be few patients that experience involuntary colors when they smell things. Out in the world, lots of people can think synesthetically. As you’ve noticed, most folks don’t bat an eye when you ask them to describe the color of a smell.

I can’t believe I’m such a nerd-ball to include footnotes in a blog comment, but here goes:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8837406
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9100340