In my experience, “depressant” drugs - cold medicines, tranquilizers, liquor, and (back in the day) pot all heighten the synaesthesia effects a bit, and stimulants - caffeine, ritalin - subdue it.
Going back to something Christopher said, this is never like a hallucination for me - colors aren’t shooting out of letters or anything like that. It’s more a sense that “these things just go together because they do.” Sixes are female, Pink Floyd’s music is usually green, chocolate ice cream is a winter food and I wouldn’t dream of eating it in the summer. I do play music bits over and over and quite loudly because I like the way it feels in my head. I’m hyper-aware of texture and sound, and have an extremely sensitive sense of smell (despite the fact that I am a smoker and people insist there’s no way I can be smelling their shampoo from across the table.) My memory seems to be extremely visual and smell-oriented… if I read something and am paying attention to it, I can repeat it verbatim years later because I can still see the words on the page (and can remember where on the page the particular text was); smell-wise, certain smells trigger particular memories, and they’re more often than not very mundane moments, rather than “lilacs remind me of my grandmother.” And in reverse, too - certain memories trigger smells for me.
I asked about the ADD/autism/etc connection because I have always sort of lumped this in with my assorted “disorders” - I do have ADD, and mild OCD (more compulsive than obsessive). One of my little weirdnesses is trying to classify and quantify things, and I have decided (with absolutely no real evidence and certainly no psych or medical experience) that all these things fit together somehow on a spectrum I call “minimal brain dysfunction” - in other words, my brain isn’t broken, it’s completely functional, it just works completely differently than a “normal” brain.
I have a very good sense of smell, too. Like the synaesthesia, I thought everyone smelled as acutely as I do until recently. I mentioned something to my husband about how his hair and skin smelled, and he said that he can’t smell hair and skin. How can you not smell hair? It smells like hair. And skin smells like…skin. The downside is that people who load on the scents are very difficult for me to handle - it’s like being around someone who is yelling constantly.
Again, the research shows that synaesthetes have phenomenal memory which is noted for the clarity and detail given when described. There is also apparently a strong sense of order for synaesthetes - from personal experience I’d go halfway on that. I’m very particular about where certain things go but I don’t obsess about it. Often it’s about having a nice space to work in or something nicer and more ordered to look at (e.g. keeping coloured pencils in the ‘proper’ order). That said I can also be horribly messy at home.
I’m not attacking you **LifeOnWry ** but I take great exception to being told that I have a brain ‘disorder’ and I suggest you start doing that too! My experiences and the research done by the profs seems to indicate that I am actually better off having a synaesthetic brain. Though possibly I might go deaf early due to listening to music so loud.
You see for me it is more than just an association that they go together. It’s not like a hallucination, yet the colors are real and present. I see them on the page, but it’s not like they are actually there.
Audio-visual synesthete here. Most of the time I don’t literally “see” shapes and colors in music – I just know they’re there. Mostly I associate colors and occasionally shapes with timbres and occasionally with certain pitches.
Sometimes, though, I will actually see visualizations. This is quite rare, and usually startles the shit out of me. It happens infrequently enough that I’ve never been able to figure out what is special about the sounds that do this, but occasionally I’ll hear something and simultaneously see a red haze, or yellow streaks, and such. A few weeks ago I was sitting in my recliner and was startled to suddenly see two large pea-green circles on the right side of my field of vision; it took me a few moments to figure out what had happened – my cats had knocked over a glass in the kitchen.
I agree - I think I think just fine! (It takes normal people so looooong to make connections, man! Jeeze, it’s so obvious. Can’t you see how everything fits together?)
Yeah and how in god’s name do you lot learn to even read when all you can see is flat, black letters? What? No real shapes? No colours? How do you people remember things?
Oh, I’m not feeling attacked, so no worries. I also happen to think that having ADD is a great advantage in many ways, though “normal” people would classify it as a disorder. Synaesthesia seems to be less the norm, which is the only reason I’d even lump it in there, 'cuz as everyone knows, “different=wrong”
Sorry to keep harping on the same point I did in the other thread, but I find this endlessly fascinating.
If you see sounds as colour the way Anastasaeon does, as in seeing lines radiating out of a speaker, do these lines obscure objects behind them? If there’s music playing in an art gallery, do you miss details on the art? If not, how does it work? Are the lines semi-transparent or what?
Do you see these lines all the time, everywhere (footsteps, voices, engines…) and if so, doesn’t it get godawful annoying?
Most of the time, as I said, I don’t see the colors hallucination-style. I just know that, for example, that singer’s voice is cream-colored, or that guitar is blue, or that particular piece of music is dark velvety red.
When I literally see colors, it’s only for the duration of the sound, which (thinking a bit more after that post) only seems to happen with loud sounds of short duration. I honestly don’t know if it obscures objects or not, because I’m usually too busy trying to process what the fuck just happened (aargh red haze! oh, the monitor tube blew up; aargh green circles! oh, the cats knocked a glass into the sink; etc.). If I find a way to reliably induce hallucination-style visualizations, I’ll make careful observations and report back here.
As yBeayf said, it’s not so much seeing the colors as knowing the colors - and I understand that makes very little sense. Christopher seems to have a different experience of this, but I’m almost sure we’re all describing the same thing differently. The colors are there - when I’ve been on heavy-duty cold meds or even when I’m overtired, I actually SEE them (with my eyes as opposed to in my brain) - the effect is kind of like an aura, rather than shooting or radiating lines.
As hard as that is to describe, it’s even harder thinking how to describe the gender of a word or number (and don’t ask me to, my brain is overtaxed right now.)
As for your art gallery/music playing question, I’m going to leave that to someone else, because I have issues not related to synaesthesia where that’s concerned (more ADD stuff.)
I don’t see anything so much as feel anything if that’s possibly weird enough…
Sometimes I’ll see specific shapes in that colour (ie. the sunset during Mendelssohn’s Venetian Boat Song) or have specific tastes in the back of my mouth (lemon meringue for yellow, tomato for red). But mostly I’ll just play a D-major scale and think ‘emerald green’, or see silver–moonlight especially–and think ‘champagne-flavoured’. It’s really odd to me, too.
I agree with this. It’s not a halucination. The colors are there as sure as the letters are, but the colors aren’t really part of the visual field. It’s sort of half-way between just in your head and being really on the page. I don’t think to figure out what colors I see, it happens instantly. I have never noticed an enhanced effect from cold medicines.
Numbers and letters each have a specific sex and colour to me, but I don’t actually see any colours other than what is there in real life. It’s more of a feeling for me than an actual sense being stimulated.
Wow, I’m so glad to see someone else say this; that’s how I am all the time, pretty much–I experience things in shapes in my body and that doesn’t seem to be a common form of synesthesia, to the point where I wondered for a while if I could even classify it as that. I don’t do it with tastes as much as words and numbers and smells and everything else, really; in math class I always had problems when I couldn’t fit math problems into a shape that made sense. I feel tastes in my hands, behind my ears, on my shoulder blades, down my back. I just ate some almonds a few minutes ago and I could feel them in my left shoulder. One of the pluses of this is that I’m a fabulous masseuse–when I’m touching someone’s shoulder, I feel it in my own shoulder. Also, I’m a speed reader, because I know words by shapes and can read about three at a time. I can also memorize songs after one to three listens, because I know the shape of the music in my body–when it touches my leg, or my shoulder, or the top of my head. misspelled words–and especially words with improper spacing drive me crazy–because they’re -wrong-.
The more I write the crazier this sounds, and the more I realize how difficult it is to explain.
I think the shapes and the colors and everything aren’t literally, physically there when we observe them: but think of the letter S for example. When you look at it close up, from a purely physical place, it’s just a couple of curves on a page. It’s only when you pull back a little and look at it that you know it as S–it’s a built-in meaning separate from the purely physical presence of it. So now think of it as having another layer of meaning to it, that only some people see, a deep red shade that lightens on the inside of the curves. It’s not physically there–but it’s still part of the letter.
Could someone please link a good site for this?
I tried to google it and the only sites I could find for a few pages were just about the numbers and sounds.
I would like to read up on the different kinds.
Like I said mine is mostly with taste and smell and I’m not sure if that fits.
My synaesthesia is mostly about taste. When I eat something it almost always tastes like a shape or a color, often both. Sometimes the shape and color are related to the object. An orange tastes orange, but why does pasta taste violet?
Chocolate tastes oval. The higher the percent, the more elongated the oval tastes. Unsweetened chocolate tastes like a straight line, crappy cheap milk chocolate tastes like a circle.
Sometimes I make pasta sauce from scratch and I get frustrated because it’s too pointy or not pointy enough.
These are just examples, everything I eat is like this.
I’ve learned to curb my instict to respond to “How did you like <whatever>?” with words like, “Oh, it was wonderful really quite pink and green, and just round enough” and say something like, “Yummy” instead.
I posted a link upthread someplace for the UCL site. It’s not big on descriptions upfront but does have an interesting faq section and also has screeds of links to various synaesthesia associations around the world plus a few pages which individual synaesthetes have posted. I lack the energy to post all those links here so I’ll just give you the main one again.
I think everyone has synesthesia to some degree, and there are may different varieties of the experience.
People with perfect pitch are probably synesthetes of a particular type. A friend of mine who has perfect pitch described it as hearing the notes as distinctly different as you would see the colors of the rainbow. He wasn’t even aware that other people couldn’t do what he could until high school music theory class.
