5. The Taste of Words

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

The Mercedes-Benz Dream Days are back with offers on vehicles like the 2025 E-Class, C-L-E-Coupe, C-Class, and EQE sedan.

Hurry in now through July 31st.

Visit your local authorized dealer or learn more at mbusa.com/slash dream.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

Hi, Hannah.

I'm doing some drawing.

You can probably hear the pen.

Perfect for radio, Dara.

Yeah, you know, it feels like I'm not really working this medium exactly yet.

I want to test you in something.

Please do.

You cannot be wrong in this test.

I want to see how your brain makes associations.

It feels like a trap.

No, there's not a trap at all, the slightest.

I've drawn two shapes.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Can you see the shapes?

I can see the shapes.

How would you describe the shapes?

Because we are on radio.

One of them is a very bubbly cloud.

Bubbly cloud, okay.

Nice rounded edges.

That's what I was looking at.

Quite splodgy.

Yeah.

And the other one is quite sharp-edged and spiky.

Yes.

Now, I'm going to give you two words.

Two words that we associate.

And you have to tell me what you associate with those shapes.

The words are booba and kiki.

Booba and kiki.

Booba and kiki.

So which is which?

Feels like booba fits the round one better.

The one that looks like a cloud sort of just feels more booba-like.

Right.

It does feel more booba-like.

And the other one?

More kiki?

More kiki.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, let's try something that's completely different.

Like a bit of classical music?

Actually, I'm quite partial, yes.

The decorated red wine?

Of course.

Yeah, would you have those two things together?

Would you regard them as a similar thing in your part of your brain?

Only if I'm feeling very partial.

Okay, fine, great.

Well, look, I'm going to pay two pieces of music for you.

Clip one, I think, is Beethoven.

Sumptuous, I would say.

Yes, it's rich, isn't it?

Rich orchestral, there's a lot going on there.

And the second piece is by Mozart.

Okay, don't tell me anything else other than which one of those is red wine and which is white wine.

It sort of feels quite obvious that the first one is red wine.

It's obvious that the first is red wine.

Why would it be obvious?

They're totally unrelated things.

One is a piece of classical music, an orchestral piece of music written hundreds of years ago, and a glass of red wine.

But I think it's like

one of the pieces of music is richer and deeper and more sumptuous.

And then the other one is sort of lighter and fresher.

No, no, no, again, I'm writing these down.

Interesting results.

They

certainly have the air of a psychiatrist about you.

Do you think that?

Okay, that's also interesting.

Do you think that?

Because that's the topic we're talking about today.

It's the way in which people's brains make these associations, and some people make these associations all the time.

Because there's nothing actually about that music that means that it should be red wine, unless it's white wine.

Nothing about that shape that means it should be kiki or boba.

But you're just drawn to those associations because of the way way that our brains work.

Yes.

Okay, so this brings us round then to the topic that was prompted by 11-year-old curio Esther from Bristol.

Because when Esther thinks of the days of the week, she also has some associations, a kind of unusual experience.

Have a little listen.

So, when I think of the week, I come up with like long running parallel lines that go up in a kind of rainbow shape for the week and go down flat for the weekend.

So, Wednesday is at the highest point and Sunday and Saturday are low.

So it kind of extends, it connects to a month which connects to a year which connects to like all of time basically.

And it feels cool.

I think it's very cool.

Most people say, no, no, I don't really know what you mean.

How does it work?

Like, why do I have this and why do other people not have it?

So Esther has challenged us to find out what's going on here.

We have two experts in the studio with us to help us find out.

Julia Simner is a professor of psychology at the University of Sussex.

And Jamie Ward is a professor of cognitive neuroscience, also at the University of Sussex.

And Jamie, I'm going to start with you, if I can.

What is Esther actually experiencing there?

So what Esther is describing is something that I would call sequence space synesthesia.

So a sequence such as days of the week is experienced in space in a particular pattern.

Often people with sequence space might have an even day, so maybe Saturday is a lot bigger than a Tuesday because it's just so much more going on.

And often these are 3D, so maybe they're outside of her body and she can look down.

I don't know because I've not met Esther, but these sorts of things are common.

They're also kind of idiosyncratic.

If I ask you to visualise a calendar, yeah, maybe you're going to do it in a straight line, but you're not going to put it in 3D with a wiggle

in the same way as Esther would.

You said synesthesia there.

And presumably, synesthesia, I mean, it goes well beyond just this particular type of seeing days of the week as physical spaces.

Yes, exactly.

So the classic examples of synesthesia are when you listen to music, you don't just hear it, you see it.

And you would see colours and shapes, and the shapes are dancing and have textures and so on.

So it's an animated spectacle.

Or as people are listening to my words, maybe they see the colours of the words spelled out like ticker tape.

Is it any kind of connection between two things that are seemingly unrelated?

Well, there's obviously a bit of a grey area as to where synesthesia begins and ends.

We think of synesthesia as having normally sensory properties so like a colour or like a taste or a location in space but there are other things like maybe some people have a gender for the letter A.

So A might be male and bossy and B might be, I don't know, his girlfriend.

How common is this?

Well, synesthesia exists in so many different forms, but one of the studies we've done that looked at a wide variety of types came up with about 4%.

So the intriguing thing is that everybody knows somebody with synesthesia, but you don't necessarily know who it is.

One in 25 people.

Something like this.

And we've given talks where we've said, well, here's this strange thing called synesthesia.

And people go back and they talk to their mother or their girlfriend or whatever.

And all of a sudden, this person they've known for many years says, well, this is trivial.

Of course, you know, days of the week are arranged like this.

Of course, music has colour as well as sound.

So there'll be people listening to this who don't know that they're synestheses.

And yet, the way that we're describing it, this will be their discovery.

Absolutely, yeah.

Yeah, so a story related to that.

So, 20 years ago, when Jamie and I started to work together, my parents asked me what I was studying, and I said, Oh, I'm studying this thing called synesthesia, and this is like people who might think that Tuesdays are yellow.

And she said, Oh, that's ridiculous, isn't it?

Because everybody knows they're grey with that tweedy texture.

And that was the moment I found out that my mother had synesthesia.

Julia, is there a spectrum for this?

Is there a severity the wrong word to use?

But how synesthetic somebody is?

Yeah, there is.

I mean, and it runs from not at all.

In fact, it runs from almost the opposite of synesthesia, which some people that we study have a condition called aphantasia, which is the opposite of having good mental imagery.

They're people without any mind's eye at all.

So that's at the bottom end of a spectrum here.

And then it can go right the way through into synesthetes.

And as soon as you're a synesthete, you can have one variant, you can have two or three variants.

But like, for example, well, I know I'm not a synesthete, I will still make associations.

Right, yeah.

And that's also another continuum.

So

it is true that even if you do not have synesthesia, you're holding synesthetic associations at an implicit level that you might not even be able to verbalise.

So here's an example.

You know, if you imagine that I had a piano in front of me and I'm tinkling on the very top notes, and then I'm crashing down on the low notes, and I say, well, one of these is a really pale yellow colour and the other one is a deep dark purple colour, which is which?

And almost all people, synesthetic or not, will agree that the higher notes feel like lighter in colour and the lower notes feel darker in colour.

Now that's something I feel as a non-synesthete, even though I never really would never really mention it or talk about it.

But synesthetes who have overt synesthesia are seeing these same associations as overt colours in their mind's eye or sometimes even projected out into space.

Well you actually see the colour.

So I tell you a story.

I was at a conference and I was sitting next to a scientist, a geneticist, and he's actually pioneered the genetics of synesthesia research.

And he's also a sound colour synesthete, a music colour synesthete.

And he told me a story.

He said that when he was a little boy, his mum and dad used to take him to the symphony in New York.

He's an American.

And he thought that the lights went down before the music started so that everybody could see the colours better.

Because he would see the colours projected over the orchestra.

And he thought, why else would you turn the lights down?

Actually sees them.

Well, see, you spoke about a condition called aphantasia,

which is the inability to see these kind of images.

But is that in any way reference to the fact that every time somebody describes synesthesia to me, I think it's the movie Fantasia, that you are literally seeing splashes of colour associated with orchestral movements.

And that is what you're seeing.

I know, I'm sure that isn't why it's called aphantasia, but it does always seem like that is the, that's my benchmark for how I think synesthesia must be.

So that's really funny because people do talk about that movie as being the earliest and maybe one of the best and most well-known representations of what synesthesia might feel like.

And people do call the absence of imagery aphantasia.

And I don't think they've made that connection before, but you're absolutely right.

Okay, so there's a range then of different experiences, but there are some extremely rare types of synesthesia.

And so Dara, question for you.

What does Tottenham Court Road taste like?

Okay, I'm trying to strip away pre-learned associations because obviously, if you said Baker Street, I would say it tastes like natas, the Portuguese little tarts, you know, the little custard tarts, yeah, because it's a really good natas stand in Baker Street Station, and then so I will often get one of those.

Um, Euston Station is as Cornish pasties because I'll be targeting going somewhere on a train, pick up a Cornish pasties.

The food that you've eaten across the street.

Food I've eaten in train stations, it's quite, you know, that I could answer.

Whereas Tottenham Court Road,

I hear the word Tottenham, I think despair, I think sadness, I think a kind of a just a remorseless

grinding.

Oh, are we not?

Oh, sorry.

But it was nice to get that in anyway.

I don't have Tottenham Court Road, I suppose they just think traffic noise.

Yeah, I think if I tried really hard, I'd say it tasted like diesel and sort of and metal.

But that is not the case for everybody because we have a clip here from James Wannerton, who, by the way, is president of the UK Synesthesia Association and has one of the most most unusual forms which is that he tastes words.

Well I was I was brought up in northwest London at Wilson right outside Dollys Hill tube station and when I was four or four and a half my mum used to take me to preschool and as I was learning to read and write at the time I used she used to get test me and get me to write down the names of tube stations as I went through those we went through them and I used to add the tastes and flavours on because you know to me it was a normal and natural reaction.

Tottenham Court Road for example I can remember going through that quite often and that that was a fantastic kind of mix because Tottenham gave me a taste of sausage, Court gave me a taste of an egg and Road was toast so it was sort of like having a breakfast every time I went through it.

So I mean some of the stations are quite horrendous actually.

I mean Bond Street for example gives me a it's a bit like hairspray being sprayed into your mouth very bitter there's some sort of language link there and it's learned because all food has does carry the flavour of the actual food it's describing a carrot the word carrot actually does taste like carrots potatoes taste of potatoes

but when I come across a station like Tottenham Court Road I've got no way of telling you where that comes from I don't know

So he tastes words and there is a tube map.

You can find this online.

It's honestly worth doing.

It's an normal london tube map where he has gone through each tube station and put down the food association you know and i'm tracking my journey i got off of fizzy water today changed uh to go to pee and ham soup it's a long walk in pee and ham soup to get to the next line up to oxtail soup which is where i got off to do the show today yeah and they're all named and some of them feel like a childhood thing they're they're very old brands of of of sweets um the uh where i associate with natas are flumps that's bakerloo they are sorry baker's free stations are flump they're sweets of his childhood that still and they stay rooted, they stay burnt in and that's the association you'll always have.

Absolutely, and we're quite lucky as scientists because when James was a young man he happened to jot down a whole bunch of his associations in a notebook and he gave it to a friend who thirty years later pulled out the notebook, gave it back to him and he gave it to the scientists.

And that allowed us to retest him on these associations and he showed the absolute number one characteristic of synesthesia which is consistency over time.

So over 30 years the same words were triggering the same tastes for James.

Every word he hears has some

creates a flavour.

How tangible a sense is that?

Like how strong is that sense?

So yes for James every word does have a taste.

It does vary across synesthetes with that form.

So some synesthetes might have 20% of words.

For James it's exactly like somebody dropping, he says it's like an eyedropper, somebody dropping a full flavour on his tongue and it covers his tongue.

Every time he hears the words,

he reads the word.

Every time he reads the word,

says the word, or one time we ran a study where we put James into a tip of the tongue state.

So there's a nice clever method in psychology where you can make someone know a word but not quite be able to remember that word.

And it often comes by showing pictures of rare objects like metronomes.

So I would show you a picture of a metronome and you would say, oh, I know what that is.

That's a um,

and James would say, oh, I'm tasting Dutch chocolate and I don't know why.

Oh, it's a metronome.

That tastes of Dutch Dutch chocolate.

And by the way, is James a super taster?

Is he in normal life?

Has he worked as a chef?

Could he, you know, is he

that's a great question.

We don't honestly know.

We do know that people who have colour experiences are really good at separating colours.

So if you go into a paint shop and you see the little,

you know, test cards, sometimes you look at them thinking, are those really the same or different?

But as Sinesit's very good at kind of separating them out.

So it may well be the case that James is like a taste expert.

He does kind of, you know, sometimes read things that are consistent with what he's eating.

So reading a story about Tottenham Court Road whilst eating a sausage and egg sandwich might be particularly nice.

So you can appreciate things differently.

He doesn't often develop new tastes as an adult and that means that when you analyse his taste they're actually really interesting tastes from the 70s so there's a lot of processed peas.

Angel Delight.

Yeah, yeah, in Angel Delight and there's almost no olives or alcohol because it was fixed in childhood but he does occasionally acquire a new taste in adulthood.

And I remember that he was watching Apocalypse Now, he was watching the movie Apocalypse Now, and he either ate a sausage sandwich or he wanted a sausage sandwich.

And over time, he suddenly realised that the word apocalypse tasted of sausage.

Wow.

And Tottenham Correct.

But new words, if he like internet, let's see, you know, Wi-Fi, do they do they gain associations now or is it all too late?

They can do because, as much as these seem like random associations looking at that map, they're actually very finely tuned associations that are based on a really complex rule system that you have to dive into.

They're actually driven by certain linguistic rules and those are complex rules that James can't verbalise.

For example, did you know that there are two L sounds in English?

So if I say the word pill

and like,

to us they sound like L's.

One ends with an L, one begins with an L.

But they're really phonologically different.

They're very different in the articulation and somebody who speaks a different language would think they were different sounds.

But most

English speakers really don't know this.

But James's synesthesia knows that because

words that contain what's called the dark L in pill, they tend tend to taste of things like milk and other words that contain the light L, words like like, that hasn't a completely different taste altogether.

In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you.

Don't let them down.

Unlock EliteGaming Tech at Lenovo.com.

Dominate every match with next level speed, seamless streaming, and performance that won't quit.

And push your gameplay beyond limits with Intel Core Ultra processors.

That's the power of Lenovo with Intel Inside.

Maximize your edge by shopping at Lenovo.com during their back-to-school sale.

That's Lenovo.com.

Lenovo, Lenovo.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with CertaPro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each CertaPro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at certapro.com.

People who live with this condition, is it bewildering to them that no one else can see this?

I believe so in many cases, because I've had conversations.

I once went into the Appalachian Mountains in America to meet a 90-year-old synesty who tastes words.

And after I tested her, she grilled me to be absolutely certain that the name John did not taste of cornbread for me.

And she was saying to me, Are you certain?

How is it that it doesn't taste of cornbread?

So I think it's a two-way street.

It's as surprising to me as it might be to a sinister to hear my lack of experience.

Have you put James in a brain scanner?

Yes, we put James in a brain scanner.

The test we did, it sounds a little bit cruel in that we got a whole bunch of words, some of which tasted disgusting and some of which tasted nice.

We did that because there are kind of, within your certain part of the brain, it distinguishes between nice and nasty flavours.

but of course these words weren't nice or nasty words they were just everyday words like table or justice when he hears a word it's a different part of his his brain that's doing the work when he hears a word he would um he would use the same parts of the brain involved in processing language plus parts of the brain involved in processing taste so it's kind of joining different parts of the brain uh together connections that don't exist in other people paints exactly and is his a particularly rare form of synthesis yeah yes it's almost so rare that we actually don't know how common it is so we would say a fraction of a percent.

Are there other very rare types?

Yeah, there are so many different types.

I mean, in a way, they're all quite rare.

So if you're talking about one of my favourite variants, which is sequences like letters and numbers triggering personality types and genders, I mean, that's quite rare.

That's 1.5%.

Coloured letters and numbers, that's 1.5%.

Actually, you know, we're also looking now at a really

what I think is probably a rare form.

And this is where the synesthetic experience is a location,

a place in a town, for example.

So the trigger here would be something very conceptual, like a conceptual category, something that you might have an argument about, like feminism or 19th-century French poetry or 20th-century French literature.

And the experience is being sort of mentally transported away to a place that has no business being associated with that concept.

So, for example, I spoke to a synesthete who,

whenever she talks about feminism, she's taken to an alleyway in the town where she used to live or when she talks about 19th century composers she's taken away to a windowsill and actually we're studying this rare variant now so if anybody recognizes this then do get in touch but it's the unusualness of the location that makes it special and the location has nothing to do with the activity or the topic or exactly that although as a scientist i hesitate because on the surface it has nothing to do with it but give me two years and maybe i'll be able to tell you why exactly that alleyway Yeah, I've I think weirdly I'm not going to I don't get into the specifics of this but there's a particular physical activity that if I do it, I'm suddenly in County Limerick in Ireland and there's no good reason to be able to do that.

But enough about your misspent years.

I'm not saying but

I wasn't, you know, there's no reason, but there's one particular I just found myself in County Limerick in Ireland.

It's very, very weird.

I don't know why.

That's not a million miles away from what we're looking at.

So yeah.

Okay.

You are one.

You know

this entire time.

I've just you're all just animated creatures in the forest.

It's all I'm seeing here, to be honest.

But that's kind of how I live my life, living in the dreamland of this anyway.

Is it something that's more common in children?

It's a really good question, and we're not entirely sure.

When you conduct a test for synesthesia and you ask children, you do find that it's emerging in children, certainly.

So we've been able to test children as young as five or six, and we're finding tiny synesthetes who have very typical synesthetic associations.

That's very cute.

And I mean, is it easy to mix it up with just childhood imagination?

So, this is really important because children have also got something called an acquiescent bias.

That means when you ask them if they have something, they say yes.

That's why we need an objective test.

So, we designed an objective test for children that really can't be faked.

So, the test will show letters and numbers in a random order.

We ask the child to use a colour palette and give us the exact shade for each letter.

And most children choose randomly.

When we repeat that 10 minutes later, the synesthetes are super consistent over time to the very shade, whereas every other child is pretty randomly picking.

And when we finish this study, sometimes the little, when we found a synesthete, they'll say something like, Aren't you going to ask me about my spatial week?

Or, aren't you going to ask me what taste is Tottenham Court Road?

All right, so there's lots of different types of synesthesia and theories about why it happens.

But what about the repercussions of having synesthesia?

So we chatted to somebody called Corin Anderson, also known as electronic music producer Corrie Ander.

Aside from anything else, excellent punning.

We twitched then about how his synesthesia has also, as you say, become the inspiration for his music.

I first realised that I had auditory visual synesthesia when I was about 19 years old, I think.

I was in a class at university, a composition class, and the lecturer asked us to describe the piece of music that we were listening to in visual language.

So a lot of my classmates were describing the piece of music as you know, resembling a sun setting behind some trees or a boat in a harbour, but I described it as a pink fluffy cube in one corner, this green metallic triangle suspended above, that sort of thing.

And they all were looking at me kind of strange, like, what are you talking about?

And then the lecturer asked me if I had synesthesia.

So, I went away and looked it up that evening, and I realised that actually what I was experiencing wasn't experienced by the majority of people.

So, when I'm creating music, what I tend to do is I tend to look at abstract paintings that to me resemble my synesthetic visualizations.

And once I've managed to produce a sound that to me looks a bit like those shapes in that abstract painting, I've then got this palette of sounds that resemble the painting in front of me.

And I use that palette of sounds to construct a composition.

All the synesthetes I know, or at least the vast majority of synesthetes I know, are involved in some sort of creative endeavour.

And and for me it's it's a it's a big part of why I make music.

Here's my question right so for Corrie he he says that his synesthesia is a key part of his creativity.

Is that true more generally?

If you are able to make these connections in your mind does that tend to make you more creative?

We find that synesthetes in general are more creative, both in terms of the occupations and the hobbies they do, but actually even if we give them more formal kind of lab-based tests.

Well, you can attempt to.

So the kinds of things we can do is say we give an object such as a newspaper and you have to think of creative uses.

So you could make a party hat, you could make a kidnap note, and you kind of give people a minute to come up with this.

And then we have people blind score though, so the people scoring it don't know who's the synesse or not.

And we find that the synesthetic responses are scored as more creative than those generated by the general population.

It feels like quite different though.

I mean, what you can do do with the newspaper feels quite different to, I don't know,

a particular colour associated with a word.

So, is it that the creativity emerges in other aspects than just only their synesthesia?

I think that that's right.

Yeah, so we find that there are differences in their kind of abilities and profile, some of which you can trace to the synesthesia, and some is probably to do with more general differences in the way that their brain is structured.

But we do find that those synesthetes who have visual experiences to music, like Corinne are more likely to engage in music so there probably is also a direct connection between the way the synesthesia is experienced and the kinds of creativity people use but in general synesthetes as a group gravitate towards the creative industries and score well on measures of creativity.

Which is quite interesting because the opposite of synesthesia which is aphantasia they gravitate to the sciences.

Really?

Yeah and I say that as someone with a family split down the middle my family family is half cylostetes and half aphantatics.

Well, one thing I was thinking actually is you were describing, you know, using those connections.

I once went in a brain scanner and was asked to do some maths while I was in there.

And the bits of my brain that were doing most of the work were sort of the visual and spatial components.

As though, and this is actually exactly how it feels, as though I'm manipulating shapes and curves and graphs and lines in my mind in order to calculate things.

I mean,

is that that

sounds quite similar to the things that you're describing, but I think that would be common amongst all mathematicians.

But also magnified in synesthetes.

So there are some really famous cases of synesthetes.

There's a chap called Daniel Tammett, who has high-functioning autism, but also synesthesia.

He's able to do things like memorizing pi to 22,000 decimal places, which, by the way, makes him the European champion, not the world champion.

But Daniel has synesthesia, and he describes his process of memorising pi as being walking through a synesthetic landscape because each of those numbers has its own shape, size, and texture.

And when he puts them together into the numbers of pi, he walks through that landscape to recall them.

It's like his own memory palace.

And he describes doing mathematics by combining shapes and synthesising new forms slightly similarly to the way you've just described.

Unfortunately, I know pi to about two decimal places and then I fall off.

Yeah, the fourth, and the three bones are.

How great a circle am I supposed to be drawing here?

It's supposed to be fine.

I'm very jealous.

That's one thing I can say, is I'm very jealous of these indexes.

Or of you, Dara, and the woodland scene that has unfolded in front of me.

It's been beautiful, actually.

It's been pastoral, it's been delightful, and there's been both red wine and high-pitched classical music going the entire way of my head.

But it is, it does feel like there is a richer universe that they are getting a glimpse of than we see all the time.

Yeah, I'm really glad you said that because for me what's really interesting about synesthesia is that it tells us something about reality.

People think that reality is out there in the world and that our brains just register it, but actually reality is what happens in our own brain.

We can take in the same signal from the outside world like a sound, like the sound of a trumpet, and the reality of that sound will be very different among different people and different for synesthetes versus non-synesthetes.

Amazing.

Yeah, so we've basically undermined everything.

Just pretty much.

In half an hour, we've got to be able to do it.

We started off with

pull the rug.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everything you were sure of, everything you thought was fine, you know, and this fine morning, you're wandering around.

Nope, turns out none of this.

This is just your brain playing tricks.

It's the matrix, essentially.

That is.

And so, wow, well, that's a lovely note to leave it on, actually.

So, I think now that we've unpicked everything, just starting with Tottenham Court Road of Sausages, and who knew it would lead us there?

Thank you very much to our guests, Julia Sinna and Jamie Ward.

Jared, the sensation that there's a party going on that you're not invited to.

Always.

I'm a mathematician, Darren.

Yeah, this is true.

Okay, well, that's very true.

And I'm a 52-year-old father of three.

But it also feels like, you know, and Esther should be thrilled with this.

Esther, ideally, why does it happen?

Because Esther is lucky and has this tremendous gift of seeing things in a way that the rest of us don't.

Yeah, one in 25 people

get that roll of the dice and get lucky with it.

The rest of us are in a cold, dead world.

It really is.

I do how grey things are when I could be with the 4% of the company that sees that lives in Fantasia, that lives in the Disney film Fantasia, where it's just splashes of colour wildly all the time.

I mean, just the notion that we're leaving people with the sense that, you know, that reality thing is reality.

It's not.

You live in a duller reality.

Sorry about that.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Subscribe to Curious Cases on BBC Sounds and make sure you've got push notifications turned on and we'll let you know as soon as new episodes episodes are available.

Humanity's journey to understanding the body has been a gory one, littered with unethical experiments, unintended consequences, and unimaginable pain.

In The Human Subject from BBC Radio 4, we investigate the stories of the discoveries that came at great human cost, but ones that also saved countless lives.

I'm Dr.

Julia Shaw.

And I'm Dr.

Adam Rutherford.

And in this series, we're going to investigate the threads connecting modern-day medicine to its often brutal origins.

And reveal the untold stories of the people who endured them.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with CertaPro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certipro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.