Those of you that associate musical keys with color. Do you all have perfect pitch? If not, how do you sense a key with a particular color when you don’t know the key?
Me too. 
Current research seems to be indicating that it’s a bit more common than was initially thought but it’s still not an everyday thing.
Haven’t the foggiest if I know about pitch or not. It just…is. Though having said that, music moves and has texture much more strongly than the colours and lights. I remember music by how it looks/moves and feels alongside how it hears. Things like pitch are really rather alien concepts to me - people talk about music being high and low when really they mean it’s over there a bit or it’s grainy.
I also have grapheme-colour synaesthesia plus a few others.
My high school really did burn down my senior year. It was a very old classical looking school built in 1922 and really needed to be replaced anyway but it held a lot of sentimental value for people. This was in rural Louisiana and the school didn’t even have air conditioning although it so hot at the beginning and end of the school year that we had to be allowed to have water breaks every hour. The school colors were purple and gold but every thing in its was so old that the drapes in the auditorium had faded to pink and beige over the years. It was these drapes that somebody designed to crawl into the auditorium in the middle of the night and light. The blaze was so quick and intense that it went from being one burning room when someone called it in to a desperate plea for help for all area fire departments just a few minutes later. The building itself was brick but the floors were mostly wooden and the janitors kept them shiny every day by coating them in oil. That seemed to help things along.
We lived about 5 miles away and my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to look out the window. The sight was terrifying even though we didn’t know what it was. Bright light reflected off clouds and made everything brighter than a full moon. Gulf War I was about to start and we were scared that the Iraqis had bombed our poor little town. We jumped in the car and drove towards it as did many other people that saw the same thing. We could only get within 1/4 mile or so because the blaze was so hot and bright. We just sat there most of the night. It was really cool and beautiful but older people were crying. We didn’t have school again for 2 weeks as they built partitions in the gym which was the only usable building left standing. The rubble smoldered for a month. We didn’t have much real school for the rest of the year. We mainly just stayed outside and played games and hung out.
I’ll go a little different. What’s it like to go 140 miles per hour on a motorcycle?
The entire world concentrates to about the size of a pin prick. Tunnel vision takes over and total complete concentration is focused on the miniscule bit of concrete you and the the bike are going to occupy for a milisecond ahead of you.
I saw that eclipse from Paris, but only 99.7% totality.
My first eclipse was in July 1991, from Hawaii. It had been a cloudy and rainy morning, and everyone was getting real pessimistic. But just before totality started, the clouds parted, enough for us to see about half of totality.
But the best eclipse I’ve seen was from the island of Guadeloupe in February 1998. Totally cloudless day, and I photographed the entire sequence, from first contact through fourth. At second contact (beginning of totality) you get a sort of panicked feeling, as a wall of darkness slams into you, then envelops everything, except that it’s still daylight around the horizon. And yes, the birds stop singing during totality.
I also photographed the Transit of Venus in 2004, from Vienna. That took over 6 hours.
It’s not that literal and conscious. It’s not like I hear something in E-flat major and the whole world looks yellow-orange. I always have music playing while I work, and sometimes I just get a feeling and don’t immediately connect it with the music. It’s just there, on some level. And I feel it most acutely with a key change; some key changes clash more than others.
For some reason I tend to be most sensitive to the keys of E and E-flat, both major and minor. Those keys are in the orange to yellow to slightly greenish-yellow part of the spectrum, and the differences are more subtle than other keys.
And as far as perfect pitch is concerned: I can tell when familiar music is played in a different key, but I can’t really identify keys the way some people can. The colors help, though.
I’ve had a tube put into my chest to reinflate my lungs. It hurts. A Lot.
Apparently, there is some rather stiff material between the ribs that must be “Punched through” in order to get the tube into the chest cavity. The medical student who had the job wasn’t really up to the task and kept jabbing repeatedly, hard but not hard enough. I remember him saying to the doc, “I think i’m hitting a rib.” The doc grabbed the tube and gave a few pokes (more screams) and described the inter-cardial-whatever before going back to helping to hold my arms and legs down. I wasn’t wearing my glasses but I do remember seeing the kid take the tube, measure x number of finger widths down the length, under instruction from the doc, and then slam that tube into my side. I took a huge breath to scream, but stopped because it was at that point that my lungs fully inflated for the first time in about a half hour. A wonderful sensation. Instead of a scream, I said “It worked” rather weakly.
Later I found out that some of the students had to leave the ER because of my screaming. Also later, my dad was joking with me about how the (male) nurse appeared pretty damn limp-wristed. I replied, “That guy shaved me for the testing dye they put in my femoral artery. He had to hold my dick out of the way to do it. Thanks Dad.”
Indeed it does. As you describe, there’s a layer of tissue that can’t be numbed with the usual anaesthetic techniques. When I got my first chest tube (note: first), I was warned of this in advance. One of the orderlies actually gaffer-taped my hand to the headboard so I wouldn’t jerk it down and mess up the procedure.
When he punched the tube through, I did manage an impressive twitch of another kind, though: my legs came up and I barked my shins so hard on the rolling table where the doctor had his tools that I drew blood. I can still feel the scarring on my shinbones, too.
And that was the first time. My left lung collapsed five times in three years. Ultimately I had to have part of it removed because it was so heavily scarred that the collapse hole had healed open. (After the surgery, I was told that the medical team could smell the anaesthetic gas in the operating theater, because it was leaking out of me during the surgery.)
That bit, having part of a lung removed, also hurts. More than a chest tube. A lot more. I find it difficult to imagine anything hurting more, actually.
Incidentally, in keeping with the theme of the thread — “tell us what it’s like to…” — the first time your lung collapses, and your lung tissue tears away from the inside of your chest wall, it feels like your face is being slowly peeled off your skull from the forehead down.
By contrast, the fifth time your lung collapses, and it’s a tension pneumothorax caused by a buildup of scar tissue, and you’re pumping air through a one-way hole into the space where your lung used to be, and this pressure is shoving your lung into the center of your chest, and compressing your heart and interfering with blood flow… it just makes you feel light-headed. Not a lot of pain: just dizziness.
Oh, and stark, bug-eyed terror, once you realize what’s going on.
But no real pain. Not like the initial collapse.
Either way, I can’t say as I recommend it.
Noted. :eek:
I’m not musically-trained enough to know if I have perfect pitch or what all the keys are. I just know what sounds like what.
We’ve talked mostly about the colours of things, but there are also the textures associated with sounds and colours of things, too. Like yellow is a soft/smooth colour, but brown is always fuzzy. White is slick. Black is very rich textured.
I have a question for other synesthetes - are you very tactile? I love to touch stuff - the texture of things is as important as the look of it to me.
This is a very vivid description. I completely understand what you mean. 
I know that people indicate that people in comas are aware of people talking to them, or that they dream. I was in a coma for four days when I was 15, and neither was true for me. I think if I was going to be aware of anything while I was comatose, it would have been the cathaterization. Fortunatly, I missed that experience. Unfortunatly, I had to be conscious for the removal :eek:
Too bad it didn’t go “pocketa-pocketa-pocketa” so you could fix it with your fountain pen. 
I don’t see how anyone could top **Lightnin’**s post. I suppose my greatest unique experience was waking up one morning, alone in bed, with a broken shoulder. (All I can think is that I had a seizure; I had one more later, but none since I’ve been on Dilantin.) I got myself dressed and took a cab to the ER, and ended up with a new joint and a gunslinger cast for a lot longer than I wanted. I’m sure none of that hurt nearly as much as Cervaise’s lung.
I’m intrigued by the music/color people here, which reminds me of my buddy’s experiments with playing music for his 3rd grade students. He played them the synthesizer break in “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, and while we thought it was just cool and “shifty” with its overlapping patterns, his students drew pictures of graveyards and such. Two girls refused to draw anything. He said he was glad he didn’t let the drums start, or he might have had to deal with some parents.
been around awhile sooo…
Won 7 “breaking” competitions, last one at the national level - (hammer fist - 7 patio blocks; 50 boards in 60 seconds with 20 different strikes)
Drowned, got pulled out, revived. I tried to help someone and got pulled under, someone else helped us both.
Died in Oklahoma City after being struck by a Pontiac GTO, brought back in the ER. And still haven’t had a NDE.
Jumped one car end to end after watching Evil Kenivals movie.
and best of all, won a 72 ounce steak dinner in Amarillo by eating the Whole thing.
I would like to go on record stating that I have never been in Oklahoma City.
Did the car come through it ok?
I’d like to tell the Board what an epileptic seizure is like, but mostly, I’m not there for them.
Leading up, about 30 seconds before, I get ‘auras’ a highly disassociative/semi-amnesiac sense of mind where everything is very real and vivid, but somehow wrong. I feel out of place. Who is this me in this place here? What set of circumstances brought me to be in this here and now? What do these questions even mean? then, :blank:
Then I come back and the nice Paramedics are lifting me on a gurney into an ambulance.
“Wha, What happened?”
“You had a seizure.”
I haven’t had a grand mal in years, but get the auras now and again. Some would diagose what I call aura as a ‘complex partial seizure’. Kinda scary, cuz I never know if it’s going to break through the meds and put me out like a light bulb. Stupid brain.
At age nine, I was hit by a 1970s-era American car, easily doing about 30-35 miles per hour at the time.
I was getting off my town’s shuttle bus alone, near my house, coming home from Judo practice, and forgot it didn’t have a handy fold-out stop sign like the school bus did. Walked right in front of the bus, and right in front of a moving car on a major street through my town. My awareness was only that reality spun 90 degrees to the right, then possibly the view of someone’s fron passenger seat through a windshield, then a very long whirling blur, then the view down my street. Then, a few moments later, lots and lots of pain (although not as much as you would have thought; thank heaven for endorphins). I had been thrown onto the hood of the car, which I rolled up and then off of, as the car screeched to a halt, at which point I tumbled through the air for about ten feet, and then rolled along the ground for another ten, coming to rest on my side next to the curb. I owe my life to two things: I had extremely thick bones, which didn’t break on impact (I had house-sized bruises on both sides of my left knee and the inside of my right knee for a couple of weeks), and the fact that my judo sensai used to make us practice not allowing our heads to hit the floor when thrown by routinely making us roll the length of an Olympic-sized gym mat without letting our heads touch. My instincts apparently kicked in, and it was just like Judo class, only much much much faster.
A brown van was stopped at the end of my street (the driver gave the eyewitness account of what actually happened above), and a man got out and picked me up to take me to the hospital. In his arms, I got a glimpse of the bus driver and the driver of the car that hit me standing on the street yelling at each other.
My mother (who knew only that I had gone to Judo class, and probably didn’t even consider me late at this point, since the shuttle took forever to get from the gym to my street anyway, and two of my best friends lived between the stop and my house) received the following phone call:
“Mrs. Anderson? This is Glover Memorial Hospital. Your son is OK…”
I think she was already at the hospital before they could say any more than that.
I lost my daughter from a freak genetic disease. We spent 5 weeks by her bedside before she died in my arms. Everyone knows that losing a child is horrific but I couldn’t understand the complexities until it happened to me. It is so far beyond what the #2 worst thing that could happen that it is ridiculous. On that day, I would have been elated if every other family member and friend combined was sacrificed in cold blood so that she could live. I still feel that way for the most part. I got warped and changed in ways that will never be reversed. For example, I have had two close family members (older) die since then. I could barely bring myself to issue a half-hearted verbal condolences let alone have any true emotion about it. I am afraid that is here to stay. My view of the world has changed in dark ways as well and I have felt myself turning to the dark side like some bad sci-fi novel. Not recommended.