Woke up this morning, fixed my coffee, made my wife some tea, and walked out onto my cold front porch with my dog. Then it hit me. The huge cherry tree in my backyard smelled like a red pyramid. Now I had had synesthetic experiences before but this was very overt and blunted…pyramidal even. So I called my wife outside and explained to her that the cherry blossoms and apple blossoms were taking on shape again.
She loves when I talk about my synesthetic experiences, but I seem to be a bit bi-polar when it comes to them. I either have no sensation of smell and shape correlation or it is blown way out of proportion, like this morning. I kind of like it. Gives me the upper hand when teaching it to my 101 students as well.
Anyone else ever have syenesthetic experiences? whaddayathink?
The bipolar thing makes utter sense. IIRC, isn’t there a correlation between the intensity of the experience (overtness, so to speak) and depression of the cortex? Actual depressants or being depressed will intensify the experience. There’s something of a tendency towards exploration of depressants like alcohol, isn’t there? (That’s vaguely recalled from “The Man Who Tasted Shapes”) So if you have any cycling of activity in your brain (similar to bipolar issues), you’d have variations in intensity, potentially significant. Your mind may also filter out ‘distraction’ level ones, and let through ‘experientially interesting/satisfying’ ones.
I have only had extremely mild synesthesia experiences, but all during times of systemic depression, often extreme exhaustion. I don’t get a visual crossover (darn! I think that would be cool), only tactile/auditory crossover (center of palms identifies the shape and density of sounds, especially voices). I can remember them very clearly, too - one particular guy’s voice was triangular pyramidal, with a hard point but a soft ‘push’, like a paper pyramid taped to a cotton ball. Oh, and um, orgasms have different shapes/textures on my palms, too, though not all the time. :o Guess that would be another time when the cortex is a bit less involved than the subcortex… IIRC, anyway.
Being so borderline, I also recognize the ‘cool’ factor from your wife. I wish mine were a bit more pronounced or common. They’re just neat experiences (as long as they don’t interfere with your daily functioning).