The letter E is purple

I decided I was a total freak. And my freakishness, however private, placed me in danger of serious social alienation. Though I was confused about what to do, one thing was very clear. I didn't want supernatural powers.

In fact, I didn't want to be special in any way. I was in high school, and I wanted to wear the clothes everyone else wore, do the things everyone else did, and see what everyone else saw -- five qua five, in other words.

I couldn't do anything about the fact that Guess jeans, the outrageously expensive fad of the moment, were out of my reach. I couldn't do anything about the fact that I actually enjoyed eating lunch in the school library. But I could try to get all those damn colors out of my head, especially since the sensory overload was sometimes dizzying. I needed, once and for all, to clear some space in my brain. So I blocked my colors like any junior varsity football star would resist a surging offensive lineman. Sometimes, those colors tackled me instead. But I kept at it. And slowly, over the years, I began to close myself off from the barrage of perceptions I had lived with since I could remember.

Even then, I never talked to anyone about it. I figured if I had to be the only weirdo who saw colors where colors couldn't logically exist, then I owed it to myself to keep the secret.

I didn't worry about colors for many years, and though I retained all of my lifelong synesthetic associations, I only rarely generated new ones. Occasionally, I met a person whose color was obvious and unmistakable, and I couldn't shake the connection. In fact, I named my daughter Esther, in part, because her color matched her name, which to me is pink. Even now it brings me deep aesthetic and emotional satisfaction to know that she and her name are so well-paired.

Finally, in my early 30s, I read a short piece on synesthesia in a scientific journal. Decades of tension I never knew I'd carried instantly lifted. My freakishness had a name. And actually, I wasn't a freak at all. I wasn't the only one perceiving my surroundings in technicolor. I recognized myself in sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph.

After the relief, though, I felt sadness and, ultimately, regret. The sadness grew out of a nostalgia for my childhood -- the fun I once had with my colors, the deep comfort they brought me, and the way they mapped to specific points in my personal history. Before I became a self-conscious teenager, synesthesia facilitated some of my happiest quiet times. It was a way to soothe myself, to assuage my own anxieties. When I met people whose colors were obvious, the color often became a way to read them and their motivations. Those colors helped me manage and navigate an increasingly confusing world.

The regret came the moment I read the phrase "the gift of synesthesia" in that scientific article. Because, by then, I'd come to accept and even like my eccentricities; I seized on the well-documented link between synesthesia and artistic originality. (Some famous synesthetes include the writer Vladimir Nabokov, the artists Wassily Kandinsky and David Hockney, musician Franz Liszt and the physicist Richard Feynman.)

Synesthesia could have sprouted genius in me -- or, at least, that's what I told myself. Now that I can appreciate how full-throttle synesthesia could have energized my adult consciousness, I mourn the way I so casually excluded myself from its bounty.

I recently outed myself as a synesthete to my family, and they were astounded -- especially my father and brother, who are both neuroscientists.

"Why didn't you tell Dad?" my brother asked. "He's spent his entire career researching the brain. Didn't you think he'd be interested?"

In fact, many scientists are intensely interested in synesthesia right now. The revolution in cognitive science and the sophistication of new neuroimaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging means that the study of cross-talk among the senses is white-hot.

As breakthroughs make it possible for scientists to look more precisely at connections and pathways in the brain, more evidence-based articles on synesthesia are being written than ever before, and in 2006 the brain research journal Cortex devoted an entire issue to synesthesia.

A University of Washington neuroscientist has even produced a Web page on synesthesia for kids. "Perhaps you are completely convinced that Wednesdays are light red," it says. "If you have experiences like these, you might have synesthesia."

But when I was a kid, I never would have guessed the rainbow that filled my head was a function of how many nerve cells were touching deep inside my brain. To me, those shades of light were as real as the bright sun that hovered over our swing set the day my 4-year-old announced that E is purple. I don't know yet if his letters actually pulse with color. But, for his sake, I hope they do.