Are there any other synesthetes here? What types do you have?
I have colors for a whole range of things- letters, numbers, music, concepts, some smells, some pain, and a little taste.
I also have spatial positions for concepts, usually in the wrong place. For instance, I see “left” as being on the right, and “right” as being on the left. Same thing for conservatives/Republicans and liberals/Democrats- respectively over my left and right shoulders. This is why, at age 19, I still can’t tell left from right with any certainty. :smack:
There are some here, occasionally there will be a post on smelling numbers or tasting colors etc…etc… All very interesting but so incredibly rare it’s tough to get a group of synesthetics together to actually have a chat.
Question for any who want to chime in: at what age did you figure out that few other people shared your gift? Like all kids you probably assumed that what you experienced everybody else did, right?
I just pretty much took it for granted until I was an adult, and discovered there was a name for it.
I associate colors with letters, numbers, typefaces and music. I don’t literally *see *the colors though, like some people. It’s more like looking at a black-and-white photo, and you just know the grass is green and the house is red.
But music gets very strange. The notes have different colors, as do keys. And it’s all affected by instrumentation, tempo and dynamics. That’s why I can get just totally absorbed in some instrumental music; lyrics can be a distraction.
Early 20s. And no, I assumed that there was something strange about me, not that everyone experienced the same thing. No one ever said anything about it, so I had no reason to believe it was common.
I’m sound → color, of the variety wiki refers to as “broad band.”
Most people throw out the center of a head of lettuce, or the middle of a bunch of celery. I like that sweet yellow flavor, but I don’t think that’s synesthesia. I met a pregnant woman who had developed it during her pregnancy. She thought it was interesting, but she hoped it went away with childbirth. I lost touch with her, and I don’t know if it did.
Same here, which is unfortunate since recognizing it earlier in life could have greatly helped my speech therapy.
My hearing was checked out at an early age because of my problems with language, and instead of learning certain sounds through osmosis like most kids, I had to learn them through rote memorization. They simply, in my world, didn’t exist. I literally could not hear the difference between the words run and won. As an adult, I manage most of my verbal communication by brute force and still miss the meaning about half the time when someone says something to me. People probably think I’m either Deaf or stoned with how often I ask them to repeat themselves. The words enter my ears just fine, but in my head they become…something else. Sensations, mostly. Warm, cool, a scent, that particular feeling of sandy feet on a California beach in June, etc.
The personification of certain concepts is particularly interesting, though. Different seasons, days of the week, and numbers have personalities to me. When certain numbers come up, I feel like I’m getting a visit from an old friend.
I was aware that other people didn’t taste things in color or shape when I was little. I learned to keep those things to myself. I always associated colors with numbers, shapes, days of the week, feelings, etc. For me everything I eat has a color and shape associated with it. It is really hard for me to describe “how did it taste” to someone else because “slightly blue and very round” doesn’t mean anything to them.
I was in my late 20’s when I hear a story on synesthesia on NPR. I was really excited to find out other people like me existed and that it had a name.
I wonder if you would talk about this a little for me. We can take it to pm if you would prefer but here’s the reason I ask: my eldest child has a language disorder which has not really been diagnosed yet, despite his having been regularly tested and so on since the age of 3. (He is now 9) At this moment they have settled on calling it a language disorder with features of auditory processing disorder. An acquaintance of mine hs long insisted that he is clearly synesthetic and that this is part of his problem with language.
He might be; certainly his storytelling is rife with synesthesia, the literary device.
However, I cannot find anything anywhere which associates synesthesia with language problems – except where both are secondary to an autism spectrum disorder, then it’s tossed in as a side note but not really laid out anywhere. And I find it puzzling that – if there is some link – not a single one of the very (very) many professionals who have seen, talked to, tested and otherwise observed my kid brought it up even once. Nearly every other damn thing under the sun has been brought up after all.
I first heard the word synesthesia as a neurological condition as opposed to a literary device at the age of 41 (from that same acquantance actually) and was astounded to discover that my experience was not universal. I honestly never thought about it even once as far as I can remember, though I still think on some level that people are just kidding when they say they don’t experience it, or maybe that they don’t really know what I mean and if they did they would say “oh, yeah, that. Sure, everybody does that.”
Anyway if you could expand on the language connection I would be most grateful.
My mother was cooing over the new word, when I (thanks to this board) was able to put a name on something one of my brothers does.
He has a blue pain (dark electric blue) on his side, sometimes, not to be mistaken with the out-of-air pain you get when you exercise hard and wrong (this one is a rust red); other tactile sensations are other colors.
Both that brother and me have some “laterality issues” as well, but I’d never thought that my problem remembering what the heck “this side” is called could be linked to anything except brainfarts
I’ve got the most common colored letters and numbers variety. I never thought of this as odd, and it’s not the sort of thing that comes up in conversation, so I thought everyone assigned colors to letters and numbers. (numbers also have personalities and genders to me, but I’m not sure that’s related)
A coworker was talking about synesthesia recently and was surprised I have it. He thought it would make life more interesting, but I don’t think it is. It’s just the way I’m wired. Most people know the letter “S” has two curvy parts. I happen to also know that it is red. shrug
It did come into play when I was naming my kids. Not only did the first names have to sound good with the last name, they also could not clash. (to me, words take on a generalized color based on the colors and prominence of their constituent letters)
I have the minor, and ISTM fairly common, one - numbers have a shape and a colour to them. I remember being surprised the first time I spoke to someone who didn’t have this, but then again it doesn’t come up in conversation all that often. I also have the colour - pain link, and some frequencies of sound, particulalry if they’re loud, have colour too.
My strongest is what that wikipedia article calls spatial sequence; I have a very strong spatial understanding of time: days of the week, months of the year and so on. It’s hard to represent in two dimensions, but it’s very strong. Sometimes I try to force myself to think of it in a different way, but it’s a real strain. (And until this very moment, I didn’t know that this was a form of synasthesia, huh).
Huh, that’s how I experience scent. I wonder if I have this ability…
Right now, I’m wearing a perfume that smells like a flat board with a green ball on top. I have another perfume that smells like a downward slope going away from me, and another that smells bright gold, like light hitting a gold ornament. My friends would roll their eyes at me if I told them this, as though I were making it up or deliberately being weird.
Do people do this with time/concepts, too? To me, a year is shaped like an oval, and I’m standing in the middle of it facing in different directions. If I think of November, I’m facing North and it’s in the 10:00 position, but if I think of July, I’m facing South and it’s in the 6:00 position (12:00 to my perspective).
Numbers are shapes to me. They have been since I was very young, and I’d like to credit some of my ease of learning and using mathematics to the fact that I can see how they ‘fit together’.
Sounds have light and color values. I’ve always had it to a certain extent. It got a lot more pronounced when I was on SSRIs, mood-stabilizers, and anti-psychotics. I am no longer on any kind of medication, but it hasn’t abated to its previous levels.
Any noise except speech has a light/color value. Often shifting as the noise shifts. I don’t know why speech doesn’t. It never has.
It gets worse if I’m about to have a migraine (fortunately, I don’t get them often–I’m more likely to get the pre-symptom/aura stuff, and then nothing). I can’t listen to music then, either, if it contains more than one instrument. The parts separate out, and I’m just left with clashing noise.
My diagnosis was APD as well and I imagine speech therapy would have been assisted if the synesthesia had been recognized early on. Even if I couldn’t understand the meaning of words, I could understand what they felt like, for example. Since I’m able to speak clearly and understand what people say about 50% of the time (which means that the other 50% I have to ask them to speak again, slowly, while looking very confused…as I said, a lot of people assume I’m Deaf or stoned) and lack insurance, I haven’t had any further therapy since elementary school.* In my own experience, it’s a sort of audio dyslexia. I hear the sounds just fine, but they aren’t words to me. Sometimes, I can even repeat what was just said to me without understanding it. When I have difficulty with my own speech, I may switch the order of words oddly (as an example, yesterday I was telling my coworkers that they had worked really hard and it turned into, “You’re working guys hard!”) or replace vowel sounds or drop Rs, but luckily that’s not terribly common these days.
The only link between the two that I’m aware of is Asperger Syndrome or ASD like you mention, but while it’s possible I could have traits of those…it seems very unlikely. In addition to personifying sequences (“6 multiplied by 7” is a sweet sentence that always makes me feel loved), I also personify all sorts of things and worry excessively about the feelings of others. My excess of empathy makes me being an Aspy very, very unlikely.
I wish I knew more of what might connect the two, but sadly, I don’t and can only offer my own experiences. There doesn’t appear to be much research on a connection between the two outside of them often occurring together in certain individuals.
I will say one nice thing was that the school district still had me coming in for speech therapy even after I was homeschooled. Once I was able to mimic the sounds I was missing that ended, though, and so further therapy wasn’t forthcoming. Since there wasn’t much that could be done for APD in the long run, I suppose I can see why resources weren’t wasted towards that.
