"Tenberken herself had impaired vision almost from birth but was able to make out faces and landscapes until she was twelve. As a child in Germany, she had a particular predilection for colors, and loved painting, and when she was no longer able to decipher shapes and forms she could still use colors to identify objects. Tenberken has, indeed, an intense synesthesia. "As far back as I can remember," she writes, "numbers and words have instantly triggered colors in me...The number 4, for example, [is] gold. Five is light green. Nine is vermillion....Days of the week as well as months have their collors, too. I have them arranged in geometrical formations, in circular sectors, a little like a pie. When I need to recall on which day a particualr event happened, the first thing that pops up on my inner screen is the day's color, then its position on the pie." Her synesthesia has persisted and been intensified, it seems, by her blindness.
Sacks, Oliver. "The Mind's Eye." Miller and Spellmeyer, 480-1.
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