For some people, looking at one or more of the numbers in the image will be an aesthetically unpleasant experience. “But zero is black!” they will think to themselves. Those with black (or red, or upper left, or shy, or any other type of additional sensation) zeroes are synaesthetes – for them, the perception of a stimulus (the inducer) in one sense will activate a sensation (the concurrent) in a second sense, or a different aspect of the same sense. About one in 23 people (Simner et al., 2006) has one or more forms of synaesthesia. However, apart from a brief period of interest in the late...

Our language is filled with metaphors (Gibbs, 1994). We have “bright” ideas, try to stay “balanced”, and feel “close” to others, but sometimes feel “down”, have “dark” thoughts, and “explode” with rage. What is the purpose of such language? According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980; 1999), metaphors allow us to understand abstract thoughts and feelings that cannot be directly seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. Stated a different way, we may speak metaphorically because we think metaphorically. Social psychologists have provided some evidence for this idea (Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010...