Well, that’s to be expected since synesthesia is caused by cross-wiring in the brain that shouldn’t be there and only happens by accident and/or trauma… That would be like you saying “all schyzophrenics don’t have the same hallucinations, therefore schyzophrenia’s fake”. The most you can expect is internal consistency.
I’m not sure sound synaesthetes actually *see *a particular colour when the sound is played (that would be extremely trippy, wouldn’t it ?), they merely automatically asociate a given pitch with a different sensation or concept. Sort of like a “normal” person could say somebody “looks like a Steven” - it’s not like there’s a quantifiable Steven-ness that only they can perceive, or that Stevens appear different to them, it’s just a deep feeling you can’t quite shake.
At least, that’s how my SO tries to explain it.
I’d suggest duplicating the anecdote you quoted above : get yourself a sound/sight synesthete, play him a hundred different tunes and jot down how they describe it. Then jumble the order of the tunes and do it again a day, week or month later and see how well they match. Even if it’s a fib, it’d be very difficult for them to remember which fib goes with which tune.
This is where you’re wrong. Clearly you don’t understand what synesthesia is. Synesthesia causes the person to perceive a stimulus with more than one sense, and sound-color synaesthetes literally see color as the aberrant sensation, not just “feel it” or imagine it. With the eyes closed, it’s a flash of color than interrupts the darkness you usually see, and with the eyes open it’s a wavering of color at the edges of your sight. I find the former a lot more irritating than the latter, because it keeps me from falling asleep some nights, like bike week (to me noisy bikes sound purple, ftr).
It’s not uncommon for sound-color synaesthetes to wonder if there’s something wrong with their brains when they first become aware of their “ability” because you’re not supposed to see anything when you hear things. Do you think we’d worry about our things like brain tumors or halucinations if it sounds only evoked the imagination?
I knew a number-color synesthete. Not artistic at all, instead very analytical and extremely skeptical, would not ever have attributed it to ESP or whatever. But was very definite that certain colors would come very strongly into his mind whenever certain numbers were presented to him.
He also had that thing where you sneeze when there’s sudden bright light. As long as we are talking about oddball neurological phenomena. I thought he was pulling my leg. Nope.
Einstein reported seeing shapes and (I believe) colors that went with the shapes. And some guy named “Daniel,” whom I’ve seen on a few TV specials, is a math freak that says he interfaces with math via colored shapes. Like the number “7” is perhaps a yellow oblong shape that is bent toward one end. Different numbers have their own shape/color, and combinations have their own. He’s one of these guys that can carry pi to umpteen decimal places for hours at a time and think the fifth power of 2,743 faster than you can log it into a computer ("I would use a calculator, but it’s faster to do it in my head!). I’ve heard of several genius types who use this same medium for remembering and calculating data.
There’s more than one type of synesthesia, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Many (most?) of us don’t literally see the colors, but we know what the colors are. For me, it’s like looking at a grayscale photo, and just “knowing” that the grass is green and the sky is blue.
I remember when I was in kindergarten, and we had to cut letters and numbers out of construction paper. Even by that age I already knew what most of the colors should be, and I accused the other kids of using the “wrong” colors. My eyes were seeing the actual colors of the paper, but my brain knew what the colors should have been.
As an artist, I’ve done a little experimentation with this . . . painting letters and numbers with the wrong colors. They have a very jarring effect, and I can’t look at them for long.
fMRI imaging of synesthetes is giving us much greater insight into how the brain is working when they have these types of jumbled senses. In most cases it appears that the brain in is active in much different areas for synesthetic senses than it would be for our normal senses. For many it can actually prove to be a benefit. Daniel Tammet is a Savant/Synesthete who has a very light case of Asperger’s (as opposed to most savants who are usually highly autistic, like Kim Peak), he experiences numbers as a rolling landscape of shapes and colors and images which have allowed him to manually calculate pi to something like 20,000 decimal points.
Like panache45 said, there is more than one type of synesthesia. I experience lexical-gustatory synesthesia, meaning that some words, whether I hear them, think them or see them on a page, have a taste. The taste isn’t the same as if what it tastes like fills my mouth (for example, I think angry tastes like sausage, but I don’t feel as though I’ve got sausage in my mouth - the sound just evokes the same sensation on my tongue), but it does have a distinct taste.
Interestingly enough, I also have a seizure disorder, which is more common in people with synesthesia than in the general population (or maybe synesthesia is more common in people with seizure disorders?). Anyway, both synesthesia and epilepsy have a lot to do with the wiring of the brain, so I guess it makes sense that epileptics are more like to have it. I’ll bet if more research were done, scientists would find that people with migraines are also more likely to have it.
I’ve had synesthesia for as long as I can remember - even before the seizure disorder developed when I was in my early 20s. Perhaps that was a precursor? Sometimes I wonder if having synesthesia has made me better at languages - I can make some odd word associations. But who knows?
Either way, given that people are so very different and there really doesn’t seem to be any totally normal person without something about them that’s different (depression, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, a skin condition, severe PMS, anger issues), the presence and diversity of synesthesia isn’t all that surprising.
The OP is kind of being a jerk. He’s told that certain people experience phenomena in different ways, and his reaction is to call them liars – because apparently he is the final arbiter of how perception works in every person’s head. No one claims that synesthetes have some deeper connection to reality, but we do experience the world differently than people without.
There’s an elegant test (which I read about in Dinosaur Comics) to determine if someone claiming synesthesia is telling the truth. Ask them to describe what they see/hear/experience for a certain note (or number, or color, or whatever). Then ask them again a year later. The synthesetes will give you the same answers.