"Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies..." Or so goes the controversial Beatles song that critics say was written when John Lennon was on an LSD trip (hence the letters LSD in the title). Whether this was a product of John's psychedelic high or really just a response to the image that Lennon's son drew of 'Lucy,' we would never know. Some people claim that if you listen to this Beatle song, you'd be able to picture kaleidoscope-eyed Lucy amidst diamonds in the sky. However, it would take a synaesthete to prove that possibility.

According to a study conducted by the University College London (UCL), most of us prefer an image to be combined with sound, rather than view it in and by itself. Dr. Jamie Ward of the UCL Psychology Department said that "combinations of sound and vision go together better than others.” The ability to see words and letters is actually inherent in every one of us, but being able to do involuntarily is a condition called synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia (or synesthesia) is a neurological condition wherein two or more bodily functions are able to intertwine and function at the same time. Synaesthesia is also said to be induced by LSD, magic mushrooms (or psilocybe), and other psychedelic drugs. The most common is the grapheme-color type, where letters or numbers are described and seen as colored, while other types are the number form synesthesia, personification, and the writer's personal favorite, the music-color synesthesia.

What happens when a person experiences music-color synesthesia, you ask? What basically happens is that individuals get to experience and 'see' colors by listening to music. Synesthetes rarely give the same colors for specific tones, which means that although different forms of music may evoke them to see certain colors, the hues sometimes vary. Evidence shows that for synaesthetes, there is no imagination involved, they literally see words and letters when listening to certain forms of music.

The UCL team set out to conduct an experiment where six synaesthetes where asked to draw and describe their experiences while listening to music by the New London Orchestra, a control group were asked to do the same. The images drawn by the participants were then shown to 200 persons, asking the latter which of the images best fit the music of the New London Orchestra which was also being played at the time. They found that all of the 200 respondents chose the images drawn by synesthetes.

According to Dr.Ward, this experiment shows that "all of us have links between our hearing and vision – even if we don’t really realise it." Kandinsky, a reknown painter and synaesthete, was once quoted to have said, while describing Composition VIII, 1923, "The painting is a good balance of contrasting noise – pure tones and cacophony – which was a delight to see. The more I looked at it, the more I came to appreciate the image and to like the ‘music’" This is perhaps why other synesthetes also describe his paintings in musical terms and annotations, while the rest of us who don't have synesthesia, can look at this image and not 'hear' anything.

Dr. Ward believes that all of us have at least a degree of synesthetic ability, but the crossover in our senses are not that pronounced. Ward further said that “We hope that understanding synaesthesia will enable us to understand more about how our senses are linked in our brains, and how this may help us create and appreciate works of art that combine music and sound.”