Pharrell Williams has synesthesia, a neurological disorder he talks about in “Piece by Piece”

PEOPLE – A UFO. The next film starring Pharrell Williams, Piece by Pieceis an animated Lego musical documentary. While it will be released in French theaters on November 20, the American singer was on the set of C to you on France 5 Friday November 8, to promote it.

The opportunity for Anne-Élisabeth Lemoine to question the 51-year-old artist on an important passage in the documentary, when he describes what synesthesia is, this non-pathological neurological phenomenon which affects him and which affects between 4 and 5%. of the world population, according to Science and the future.

Music “Literally hypnotized me. I didn't even realize it. I thought all the black kids were staring at the speakers like…wow! I saw colors. This is called synesthesia. It's not a physical perception, rather a vision of the mind.explains in Piece by Piece Pharrell Williams represented in Lego.

“It’s still something we endure”

Invited to say more during the France Télévisions show, the singer defined synesthesia as “an explosion of colors” when listening to Music. “In the movie it looks super nice and cool when I tell this story, but in reality there are a lot of people who have this phenomenon in various forms”he says.

“Synesthesia is that instead of being distinguished, your senses remain confused”continue Pharrell Williams. “I hear sounds and I see colors at the same time, but there are people who see colors and who feel things. For example, purple will taste like rust, which gives strange smells.” “It’s still something we endure”he concludes.

Other examples of synaesthesia include “color graphemes,” which causes the letters of the alphabet (or numbers) to be perceived in colorful ways. In so-called “numerical” synesthesia, numbers are systematically associated with positions in space.

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