I’m curious for personal anecdotes about having synesthesia. From what I’ve read, it seems like a pretty fascinating condition, but I don’t really feel like dropping acid to find out firsthand. How is it manifested in you? To what severity? Can you control it at all? Does it effect your daily life?
I’m a synesthete, from a family of synesthetes. I’ll go get sometjhing to eat, then I’ll answer your question when my blood sugar’s high enough.
I visualize sounds and concepts. For example, songs generally look like abstract paintings, often with curving/linear/fractal patterns. Also, the number 5 is red. I can enhance or ignore it if I choose, but it’s not really possible to completely eliminate it.
Okay, I’m back and fortified with popcorn.
I have a lot of synethesia, mainly
graphemes–>color
music–>color
concepts–>color
I don’t actually see the colors in front of me, except for graphemes (more on that below). Instead, it just seems the way it should be. Like, if someone were to ask you what color the word “sky” should be, you’d probably say blue. You don’t see the blue in front of you, you just associate blue=sky. The same way, if you ask me what color October is, I’d say brown, because I associate October=brown.
With graphemes, it gets a bit weirder. If you show me a paper that says CAT on it, I know the letters are written in black. I see them in black. But they look different shades of black to me. The C is a redder sort of black, the A is a yellowish black, and the T is a green black. The little red numbers on a timer are still red, but 4 would be a bluish red.
It is very hard for me to depict my alphabet, because some letters come in different shades, some have secondary colors, some are multicolored, and some are only vaguely defined. (“What shade of green did you say L was?” “Er… green green. I dunno, just… plain green.”) I’ve done my best here and here.
Most of my colored hearing is musical in nature. Certain genres tend to certain colors- Middle Eastern music is usually a swirly sort of red, orange, or yellow. Rap is black and white, or sometimes sepia. I usually listen to religious Jewish music, which makes it really hard to talk about because nobody else has heard of it.
“Conceptual synesthesia” covers pretty much everything that isn’t sensory in nature. The most common concept syn is having colors or spatial positions for time. There’s also really really random stuff. From what I’ve seen, it’s not uncommon for a synnie to suddenly realize that their shoe size is hexagonal, or that copper and silver are more feminine than gold. I personally have synethetic associations for Shakespeare plays, biblical figures, and the word “mellow”. Oh, and my concept for “right” is positioned on the left, and my “left” is actually to my right. Yes, I am very bad with directions.
I also have occasional colors for scents, pain, and taste. Sickly-sweet scents are often purple-pink, and pungent smells are on the yellow-orange-brown spectrum. I don’t seem to have reactions to pleasant odors very much. Taste is the rarest trigger for me- 99% of foods give me no reaction whatsoever.
If you’re interested, I have a bunch of synesthetic pictures on Flickr.
Also, if you really want to know about synesthesia, there’s a synnie message board Mixed Signals (mixsig.net). They love to answer people’s questions there.
So, that’s my 2c. Anything else you want to know?
Your “chocolate” image is really close to how I perceive it. Crazy.
I’m mildly synesthetic when it comes to sounds and smells. I say ‘mildly’ because I saw a chap on TV who was plagued by horrible sensation of taste when he heard certain words. I’m nothing like that.
I’ve been a musician since I was a kid, and have always found pitches to have a colour-like something about them, as though I wasn’t only hearing them. As I got older, I realised that it was the intervals between pitches, as much as pitches themselves, that had colour associations. I didn’t know of synesthesia until much later, so I always imagined that I must have somehow made them up, but they’ve remained consistent over the years.
For example, the intervals within several modes of the major scale have a colour. The strongest is the Lydian mode, where the interval of a #11 has the brightest colour of all, a light teal green/blue. I always wonder if it’s significant that a perfect 4th is a more nondescript green.
The other strange thing is that of all the colours I ‘smell’ (for me it’s not REALLY like smelling, it only takes a fraction of a second to realise that it’s just a cross-modal artifact), that ‘sharp eleven’ blue/green is the strongest. It smells almost like a lady’s perfume, but slightly juicy and spritzy. Often I’ll smell that colour before I consciously see it, even. My mother’s old kitchen cupboards were that colour, and I’d often think there must be someone else in the room when I first went in.
The OTHER weird thing is that I did end up with tinted Irlen Lenses (as I described in another thread - I’m more convinced of their efficacy every day, by the way, despite having had doubts) and you’ll never guess what colour they are!
I see you associate letters of the English and Hebrew alphabets with colors. Is there any association with alphabets you aren’t familiar with, like Arabic, or Chinese characters?
Can you “concentrate” your synthesthesiatic sense on a word or sound to make it have a response. I mean if you hear, say, a motor humming, and it had no effect on you, could you focus on it to bring out its color?
If you could take a pill to make it all go away, would you?
I only have colors for languages I know. I think if I learned another language, I might get colors then.
Some sounds immediately suggest colors, and some I have to think about for a while.
I love having synesthesia and would never ever give it up.
For me and my daughter, it is so specific as to probably not be considered legit. I can taste the colour green. It has a very pleasant tase. My favourite flavour being that of a dark green (emerald). It started in high school. My daughter is about the same age now that I was when mine started – she sees the colour gray for a specific texture of food. It is not pleasant to her. It slipped out one day “this <I forget what the food was> tastes like gray!” Nothing else that I know of for either of us, but (and I can only truly speak for myself) it is not psychological, it is very real to me.
According to the experts at Mixed Signals, you don’t have to respond to everything to have synesthesia. You might only taste green, but if the taste is consistant over time, it’s still synesthesia.
I see some sounds - certain sounds are accompanied by flashes of color (motorcycles are purple, fridge motors kicking on are are white, my fish flinging his gravel against the tank glass is black and white etc) whether my eyes are open or not. It’s more annoying than facinating. I can’t imagine how terrible it would be to be severely affected since I know my experiences are at the mild end.
Words are concrete objects for me. I suspect it’s tied to the way phonemes are ordered in my wee brain – for example, wide open a’s are warm and e’s are small and cool.
“Resplendent” is the word I usually use to illustrate because it starts out small and folded at the top, and then swirls out into a wide fan at the end.
“Sang” is a quick bright concave arcing flash.
This also applies to names – “Jensen” is narrow and cool gunmetal fading. However, “Spencer” is a sandstone step down into the dark.
Voices have colours to me. It’s not controllable; it’s also not distracting or anything. It just is.
To me, letters and numbers have very specific genders. For example, it seems perfectly self-evident to me that 2 is female but 8 is male. A is female but B is male. Is that related in any way?
Yup. Graphemes–>personalities.
Cool! I thought I just had an overactive imagination.
I have a very mild form of synesthesia. Some words - but not all - have a taste to me. The one with the strongest taste is the word angry. It tastes like sausage. Not sausage links, but sausage patties with lots of sage. When I say or think of a word that has a taste to me, it doesn’t affect my life at all. I actually don’t mind it. But there’s no controlling it. A word tastes like something or it doesn’t. That’s it.
Same way with me, starting in elementary school. Numbers have genders, personalities, relationships with other numbers. 1-4 tend to be friends with each other. 9 is a bit of a bully with 8 as its sidekick, other numbers don’t like to be multipled/added/divided etc with them. Prime numbers tend to be loners since they don’t work well with others. 10 of course could kick 9’s ass, but is more like an older sibling that is several years ahead and doesn’t bother much with the smaller ones.
I figure it’s more overactive imagination and the fact that learning arithmetic was boring. Is that a common thing, anthropomorphizing concepts?
Never heard of this, so fight my ignorance - does this mean that, when you hear the word angry, you get a sausage taste in your mouth? What if you speak it or read it?
I do associate genders with letters, colors and numbers, and also my silverware. I also assign genders to things like fruit and my pens (often related to their color). I’m off to do some research, since I thought this was something everyone did…
That’s exactly what happens, whether I’m hearing the word, reading it, speaking it or just thinking of it. With some words, like angry, it’s so strong, I can smell them, too, and almost feel the texture in my mouth. The word green is like that. It’s creamy and cool and smells fresh. Fortunately, most words that taste have pleasant tastes, but there are some that taste like mud.
I think the type of synesthesia I experience is called lexical-gustatory synesthesia.