I'm not a biologist or a neuroscientist, but I play one on tv if my friends don't shut me up (^_^).
A while ago I saw this fascinating video by the pre-eminent Biologist Richard Dawkings titled "The Universe is Queerer than We Can Suppose." Take a few minutes to look at that video before you continue.
A brief synopsis of the video is that not only is the universe queerer that we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose. Meaning that the perceptions of humans are designed to work well in the human world. Any world outside of our daily existence is very hard (if not impossible) to correctly perceive. This is one of the reasons that Einstein's Relativity or Planck's Quantum Theories are difficult subject matter for most people. They are counter-intuitive. You get moving fast enough and you become shorter? You get small enough, and you can exist everywhere and nowhere all at once? WTF?!
What really drew my attention is his use of our visual sense as a metaphor for the senses of other animals. When he says that dogs might be able to smell color, or bats hear color, he says that because human eyes are remarkably senstive orbs whose main sensory perceptions are divided into amount of light and frequency of light. That's not necessarily a lot to go on, but our brain has learned how to interpret and comprehend the sheer amount of information encoded in just frequence as color. Color gives us an immediate intuitive handle on how to interpret the world. Healthy plants are green, dry plants are brown. Healthy humans have a red flush. Dark stuff absorbs heat & light, light color stuff reflects it. Poisonous animals & plants use the same colors as gatorade. I'm not sure how that matches up.
So, color becomes a metaphor for any highly developed sense that gives the user a way to intuitively grasp the world around them. Hence, bat's "hear" color because in a dark nighttime or cave environment, their principal perception is that of sound. They need to be able to interpret all of the details in the world around them in terms of sound.
This is where I jump off of the deep end, though I am sure that if I knew where to look this sort of stuff up, I could do more than just speculate -I could probably find studies that prove or disprove what I'm about to suggest. Either that, or studies that are inconclusive and point to that it's an open question.
People that have read about autistic, asberger (sp?) or savant people run into the term "synesthesia"a lot. Synesthesia is commonly defined to the layperson (like myself) as what happens when the brain's sensory wires get "crossed" and people begin to hear color, feel color, taste color, or even think color. One mathematical savant who can multiply ungodly large primes, or tell you whether any given day within the past 5000 years was a Saturday or not, describes his ability to do this as color & shape manipulation. He translates the starting values (say 17 & 19) into colors & shapes, combines the two into a new color & shape, and then translates that new shape back into terms that the rest of us understand (323).
So, now what I'm speculating about, is whether everything I said above is true. If color is the way that animal brains are designed to intuitively deal with complex data, and synesthesia is the psychiatrist's term for color-confusion, maybe the mental use & visualization of color is a way to hone and refine the abilities of people to think about complex computations or problems. Maybe it's only a short step from there to an engineer looking at a blueprint, and turning to his counterpart and saying, "I don't know Jim, this whole set of plans looks slimy green to me. Maybe we should redesign."
At the very least it lets us know that people that suffer from synesthesia my truly be "differently abled." Maybe their condition is something that can be trained and refined to give them an intuitive handle on the world that the rest of us lack.
I don't know if all that above made sense, but I'll play the "it's late at night, I'm going to bed" card and be done with it.
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