I have that too; the months of the year are arranged in my mind’s eye like an elongated clock face, with January through August on the right half and October through December on the left. January 1 is at 12 o’clock. Sometimes, if I’m thinking about September, it jams itself over onto the right side as well, sometimes as far up as 3 o’clock, with all the earlier months scrunched up behind it. Its relative mobility may have something to do with the fact that it’s my birth month, I don’t know.
I also find that numbers, and to a lesser degree letters, have personalities which may be related to their shapes. Even numbers tend to be calmer and steadier, and odd numbers tend to be more unstable. Five and nine are the most aggressive with nine being pompous as well, while seven is a bit quieter but somewhat unpredictable. Two is fairly serene, six is maternal, and eight is gluttonous. One and four have the least amount of personality of any of the single digits, and zero is rather zen. Three is relatively friendly but a bit mischievous.
I, too, thought these were common until I started asking people I knew about how they view time, and they told me they didn’t see it as a visual image at all.
On rare occasions, I have tasted music. I play the fiddle, and one time the upper two strings tasted very clearly of red licorice shoelaces when I played them, while the lower two were chocolate-covered espresso beans. That was weird.
I have a couple forms of synesthesia - I taste words and certain sounds are personified (or anthopomorphized (??)).
The word angry tastes like sausage. Green is cool key lime pie. The word chicken smells and tastes like glue. The word black tastes and smells like mud. The sound of castanets in Flamenco dance music is a fat black spider. Not a scary one, just an enormous, fat black spider.
I’ve had synesthesia ever since I can remember. I have a seizure disorder, which only developed in my 20s. Maybe they’re related (apparently synesthesia is more common in people with seizures or migraines or other “brain issues”), but maybe not.
Possible. I get migraines, almost always preceded by a trippy visual aura. Whites bloom badly and shift to the purple, I get ‘holes’ in my vision (not black spots, just places where there isn’t any input at all – you have no idea how hard that is to figure out when you’re not expecting it) and the whole world kind of flattens out like I’ve hit the far end of a dolly zoom. More than one person has commented that it would sound phenomenally cool if it didn’t mean I’d be curled up in a dark room with a pillow over my head about 30 minutes later.
Numbers are shapes to me, which I attribute my ease-with-math towards; when there are bunches of numbers, they ‘fit’ together and I just have to see what shape they become. Like several others here, it took me until my late teenage years to learn other people -didn’t- see it this way.
All my life, I have pictured letters and numbers with colors. When I was a kid, as I was writing out the alphabet, as I wrote each letter I would picture in my mind that A was red, B was orange, C was sometimes blue or sometimes purple, etc. Along the same lines, I sometimes picture the months and days of the week as having colors - not the days/months themselves, but the words representing them. I think of the word “February” as mint green because that’s what color F is.
Sometimes it actually does cause (minor) problems for me when I misremember a word for something else that had the same “color.” A couple of years ago, when booking a hotel for a work trip, I used a hotel in a town beginning with S. There was another nearby town beginning with A, and somehow later I thought that I had booked the hotel in the A town, because A and S are both “red” letters to me. Luckily I actually looked at the printed email confirmation before leaving, so I ended up at the correct place.
I think I may have something like that. For me, certain words have certain flavours. It’s odd, I know. It’s not something I really talk about to others.
Welcome to the club, EmilyG. Some might say that it’s some weird wiring in your brain, but we synesthetes know that we actually have insight into the secret truths of the universe.
Unless of course your brain thinks that B or W are men instead of women. That’s fuckin’ nuts.
Just going to bump my own thread to note that after going to bed yesterday I had an experience that was new to me - I felt my back pain as a smell. Quite peculiar that was.
