Are the brains of synaesthetes different?
The answer to this is almost certainly ‘yes’, but this doesn’t mean that synaesthetes are brain-damaged in any way. Most theories of synaesthesia talk simply about cross-talk between areas of the brain that might otherwise not communicate. For example, when certain synaesthetes hear spoken words, parts of the brain normally dedicated to colour are used (Nunn et al., 2002). This suggests that word centres are communicating with colour centres.
