Author Topic: Synesthesia.  (Read 2275 times)

Sajainta

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Synesthesia.
« on: May 25, 2011, 09:53:23 am »
So far, I only know two other people on here who have synesthesia--Syna and Uboa.  I hope there are more of you!

For those of you who don't know what this is, here's the very informative Wikipedia article.  To be succinct, it's a neurological condition in which the brain combines senses.  People with synesthesia--such as myself--can taste speech, or see emotions, or personify numbers and letters.  It's automatic and involuntary, and is something you're born with.  From various books I've read, roughly one out of every 9,000 or 10,000 people is a synesthete.

It's not a form of brain damage (as one idiot asked me), nor it is a mental disorder or hallucinatory (as another idiot asked me).  It's just something that's always been there.  Synesthetes cannot imagine living without it, just as non-synesthetes cannot imagine how one can taste mushroom soup when they hear certain drum beats.  It's as natural to us as breathing.

Most synesthetes thought that EVERYONE thought the same way they did until they learned otherwise.  I didn't realise that I was "different" until I was 18.  Before then, I just assumed everyone thought that four was sky-blue and a matronly figure, or that Cebuano tasted like bananas, or that my mother's voice tasted like very sweet cake.  When I found out that I was mistaken, I felt awful and thought there was something "wrong" with me.  It wasn't until six months later when I came across a Newsweek article about synesthesia that I realised that there was nothing wrong with me--my brain was just wired differently than the majority of other people.  That was a wonderful day--when I found out that there was a name for it and that I wasn't weird or alone.

The amusing thing about synesthesia is that no two synesthetes are alike.  For example, S to me has always been a light green to me--the same colour as the words May and Saturday, and the same colour as the number two.  Another synesthete I know sees S as a dark yellow.  That, to me, is just WRONG!  It's equivalent to someone claiming that 2+2=5 or that the earth is flat.  Those are WRONG, and S being any kind of yellow is just as wrong to me.  And they feel the same way about my S being light green.  It's just factually incorrect for them.

This kind of thing has led to a lot of interesting, teasing debates with fellow synesthetes.  ^_^

There are a tonne of different types of synesthesia.  The most common one is grapheme-colour (seeing numbers and letters in colour).  I have that one--hence my S being light green and my four being sky-blue.  Every number and every letter has their own colour.

Words are comprised of many different colours which kind of "blend" together, with the most "prominent" colour or sound dominating the rest of the word.  I know that sounds extremely strange and probably really complicated.

I taste sounds.  Spoken words, languages, music, and random sounds.  Driving in a car and hearing the wheels move over certain kinds of road tastes like chocolate cake; my boyfriend's voice tastes like banana bread; Arabic tastes like baked potatoes; and music is a combination of all kinds of different tastes.

Every instrument has their own taste, and even that taste varies depending on the way the instrument is being played, or the tempo.  Drums can taste anywhere from peanut butter and / or chocolate to mushroom soup to pomegranate.  Most synthesizers taste like ketchup.  Wind chimes taste like ice.  Acoustic guitar mostly tastes like chicken nuggets.

So when I hear a song, I'm tasting anywhere from three to fifteen different sounds all at once.  It can be really overwhelming!

I touch sounds as well.  Buzzing sounds feel like a very hot, rather rough object in the palm of my hand.

I can see music as colour, but it's not very prominent and it's not note-by-note as it is for a lot of synesthetes.  A song will have an overall colour.

Every number has a personality.  My favourite number is six.  He's around 19 or so.  Scathing wit, extremely sarcastic and very clever.  I even forgive him for being bright bubble-gum pink.  My least favourite number is seven.  He's dark blue, around the same age as six (although slightly younger) and is arrogant and smug and kind of a stereotypical jock.  So when people say seven is a lucky number I think they're insane.  XP

I also have number form synesthesia, which is very hard to explain so I'll just give you a link.  =)

Tl;dr, but I love talking about this.  Synesthesia is the best neurological condition ever.  My friends say it's like I have super powers.  8)

Any questions?  Any other synesthetes?
« Last Edit: May 25, 2011, 10:09:31 am by Sajainta »

Bard_of_Time

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #1 on: May 25, 2011, 07:31:48 pm »
This sounds... really interesting. I'm not a synesthete, so I don't know where you're coming from with all this. I have some questions for you, and other synesthetes.

1. Could you possibly get a really simple picture of what each letter is in color? I'm really interested in that.

2. Is it a one way street with sounds and numbers being tastes and colors? Like, if you were to taste banana bread, would it be your boyfriend's voice? Or would it just be banana bread?

Jormungand

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #2 on: May 25, 2011, 07:40:33 pm »
I'm not synesthetic, but one of my favorite composers is: Kouhei Tanaka. He's relatively well-known in Japan and has scored tons of anime and many games as well. Folks here may recognize him as the composer of the Sakurai Taisen series, Gunbuster anime, Resonance of Fate/End of Eternity, the old Paladin's Quest games, Alundra 1&2, and much much more. Some of my favorites of his:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sodrHUPsrnw&playnext=1&list=PLCB2672BD05CC1B14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKRxvEmAztM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW6nwQFrqkU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDMzLzwF57I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEZFyKpbPoc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iaOkjKgeDo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo3wT7GyA6w&feature=player_detailpage#t=77s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq21tgtWLRs&feature=related

That said, I'm quite interested in the art of synesthetes--particularly music. Anything you'd like to share Sajainta? :)

Sajainta

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #3 on: May 26, 2011, 07:34:05 am »
This sounds... really interesting. I'm not a synesthete, so I don't know where you're coming from with all this. I have some questions for you, and other synesthetes.

1. Could you possibly get a really simple picture of what each letter is in color? I'm really interested in that.

2. Is it a one way street with sounds and numbers being tastes and colors? Like, if you were to taste banana bread, would it be your boyfriend's voice? Or would it just be banana bread?

For your second question--when I eat banana bread, I just taste banana bread so the sounds-->taste thing only works one way.  And if I saw, say, the colour yellow, I wouldn't automatically think "8" (since 8's colour is yellow).  Synestheisa, as far as I'm aware, only works one way.  I could be mistaken, although I've yet to meet another synesthete who experiences it both ways.  Does that make sense?

As for your first, I made a diagram of my letters, posted below.  =)

It was really hard to distinguish the different reds, browns, and especially the yellows, so here's a bit of clarification::

A is bright red.
E is a muddy kind of red.  This colour was REALLY difficult to pinpoint, since I couldn't find it on the colour map.  So the example is the best I could do.  :/  It isn't as red in my head as it is in the picture.
M is a pale red.
R is something akin to blood red.

F is a very dark brown, whereas G is a medium brown.

C is a pale yellow, K is a greenish yellow, N is cream-coloured, and V is a bright, sunny yellow.

O is absent because she is white.  =)

I put S as forest green rather than light green because the letter varies quite a bit.  He's always shades of green, though.

U is peach.

X is silver, hence the sparkles.

Q (portrayed as a question mark) is a tricky one.  Q constantly changes colour, depending on the word it's in.

Some of the colours are a bit off, since I couldn't find an exact match, but most of them are spot-on.

And Jormungand, I'll have to respond to your post and listen to the songs later since I'm really tired and desperately need sleep, but thank you for showing an interest!  =D
« Last Edit: May 26, 2011, 11:37:12 am by Sajainta »

Syna

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #4 on: May 26, 2011, 11:13:15 am »
You know, I'd never actually looked at the wikipedia article before-- it's incredibly comprehensive. My main source of info about synaesthesia came when a philosophy professor of mine recommended the book The Man Who Tasted Shapes. He had been making some point about the reliability of the senses and asked the room if anyone associated vowels with colors-- and, dead shocked, I raised my hand. I was the only one who did, and I felt very strange, but it was awesome to finally know what on earth was up with my crazy brain. A friend of mine growing up also had music-color synaesthesia, and we got into quite a few of those 'arguments' you refer to: "This song is yellow and white!" "Nonono, it's shiny like that, but it's definitely light blue, like the sky." Of course, I didn't know it was synaesthesia at the time.

My synaesthesia is largely audio/visual, and a bit tactile-- my sense of smell is pretty lacking by nature, and taste is likewise not a very powerful way I experience the world.  I've thought about doing exercises to improve my other senses... a friend of mine has been spending a few hours blindfolded each day and has made quite a few gains on that front. It'd be interesting to see if this influences my synaesthesia, but it's probably hard-wired and I will just have to guess at the true taste of red. Sad..

So do you have a firm association of taste for each thing, or do the tastes blend into each other sometimes? Reading what you said about music makes it sound like a banquet. (Likewise with the touch of songs-- are there many different kinds? Do you experience them all as you listen to a song?) We should compare notes on a song sometime.

Music is probably where my synaesthesia manifests most strongly. Listening to music is an intensely imaginative and visual experience for me-- honestly, probably JUST as visual as audial. For example, let's take the song "Joga" by Bjork.  It's one of my favorite songs because it evokes incredibly deep greens, in a range from darkest green-black to a more foresty teal. When I listen to the song, the greens feel as though they are streaked across my mind with an extremely thick paint, Van Gogh-thick, that's shot through with black and white. Later the feeling is punctuated (when the heavy beats come in) with round pulses of silver that kind of... ripple through the image. And (here's where I get weird) the whole thing has a kind of explosive warmth, like it's about a forest that's growing on an active volcano, with rivers of lava in subterranean caverns deep beneath the roots; so I have this sense that beneath all the green there is deep soil and earth, and something slow-moving, glowing, and hot. (Those last bits are definitely associations I'm making with the song's content, and, interestingly enough, the music video also has lava in it! I listened to the song before I saw it, so that's pretty awesome.)

As you can see it is really that my brain has a built in audio visualizer. ^^

I also have grapheme-color synaesthesia, so letters have intense color associations. I actually don't associate consonants with colors, for whatever reason -- well, I do, but the colors are very faint and not very 'influential,' if that any makes sense at all.. so I have no reason to object to the idea that s is dark yellow. :D

But vowels are incredibly distinct: a is red; e is blue; o is white; u is yellow or orange; and i is a "wild card" vowel with multiple potentialities, usually green or violet, like your Q.  This leads to a fascination with "y" when it is a vowel, actually-- its color is even more mercurial because it isn't a typical vowel, and because it takes the sound of the unpredictable "i". I know it sounds strange, but the letter "y" is special to me; I suppose the significance similar to what people mean when they say they have a lucky number.

Quote
Words are comprised of many different colours which kind of "blend" together, with the most "prominent" colour or sound dominating the rest of the word.  I know that sounds extremely strange and probably really complicated.

Makes sense to me! Most words have colors for me too. Typically, the first vowel in a word will influence its color the most, but it depends. What determines the predominant color of the word for you?

Since you have grapheme-color synaesthesia, I'm curious if the names of people and concepts have colors distinct from their letters. For me, they do, and they supersede or blend in with the vowel colors. For instance, I have a friend named Danika. Danika on her own is a kind of light, intense, planty green to me, like a calyx. She's calm, creative, and quiet. However, she has a feistiness to her personality as well, and that combined with the first 'a' in her name gives her a kind of pinkish-red tinge. (This sort of thing makes naming characters really, really, REALLY difficult, by the way.)

Numbers totally have personalities! Evens tend to be balanced, sturdier types for me; odds are edgier, more prone to extremes. So 6 is definitely not a sarcastic, clever guy! ^^ He's a very normal-seeming middle aged fellow with a briefcase, but who is wiser than one would think, a lot like Richard from Neverwhere. He is also very orange. (I think I may associate round shapes in general with orange; not sure.) 7, on the other hand, is wild and defiant and potently magical, maybe because 7 reminds me of the letter y's shape.

(In light of all this, my name has a fairly interesting story. Despite the similarities to the word synaesthesia, I made it up on my own when I was eleven, way before I was familiar with the concept... though I like to think that maybe I'd seen the word synaestheisia before and had a synaesthetic attraction to it, since it's an incredibly gorgeous word to me. Syn- words, like syncretic, synthesis, and synchronicity, are generally some of my favorites. There are a number of cases where my synaesthesia has done weirdly prophetic things like that, and often, the more colorful and vibrant a word is, the more I will love its meaning. There's so much going on with perception that we just aren't consciously aware of, and synaesthesia is proof!)

Ahh, I specialize in tl;dr. Long Syna post is long. But I only know a couple synaesthetes in real life, so it's always fun to compare notes when I can!
« Last Edit: May 26, 2011, 12:19:56 pm by Syna »

Syna

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #5 on: May 26, 2011, 11:31:20 am »
Oh, and speaking of synaesthetic artwork, there is Rez!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HoV-QBt15I

IMHO this game was made by someone who really understands what synaesthesia is about. And as a music-inclined synaesthete, it's a pleasure to play.

Licawolf

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #6 on: May 26, 2011, 05:31:43 pm »
I didn't know you have synesthesia (now I understand your comment about the word "oekaki" tasting like pancakes  :) ).

I find fascinating how you and Syna describe the personality of the numbers as if you were describing a close friend. Is it the numerical concept the one that has personality or is it related to how the name of the number sounds? I mean, numbers in a different language have the same personality even if they are named differently? Do only the basic numerals (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) have personalities or bigger numbers like 150 or one million are different?

Quote
The amusing thing about synesthesia is that no two synesthetes are alike.  For example, S to me has always been a light green to me--the same colour as the words May and Saturday, and the same colour as the number two.  Another synesthete I know sees S as a dark yellow.  That, to me, is just WRONG!  It's equivalent to someone claiming that 2+2=5 or that the earth is flat.  Those are WRONG, and S being any kind of yellow is just as wrong to me.  And they feel the same way about my S being light green.  It's just factually incorrect for them.

I find this very interesting, I have heard of synesthesia before, but I always thought that all the people with the same kind of synesthesia would share the same associations. (Totally irrelevant to the topic, but when I was a child I feared that people weren't able to see the colors the same way I did. I don't have synesthesia and I'm not color blind, but the idea disturbed me for some reason). Does that mean that the map of the letters you did is completely different for each person or are there some color associations that are recurrent between all synesthetes? 

Reading all this inmediatly made me remember the work of the russian painter Kandisnky, which was based in the idea that colors and shapes had their own personalities, and their owns sounds. 

Quote from: wikipedia
Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, for examples, yellow is the colour of middle-C on a piano, a brassy trumpet blast; black is the colour of closure and the ends of things; and that combinations and associations of colours produce vibrational frequencies akin to chords played on a piano. Kandinsky also developed an intricate theory of geometric figures and their relationships, claiming, for example, that the circle is the most peaceful shape and represents the human soul.

(and looking for that quote I discovered it’s theorized that he had synesthesia, I never knew  :shock: )

I don't see how could someone think of synesthesia as brain damage, it sounds like a gift to me  :)

Romana

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #7 on: May 26, 2011, 07:40:43 pm »
I associate numbers (and letters, but mainly numbers) with colours, but I don't think there's anything else... I've heard about the other kinds from a few friends though.

utunnels

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #8 on: May 26, 2011, 10:15:37 pm »
Sounds interesting, though I don't think I can really understand. :?

Quote
X is silver, hence the sparkles.

XD This is the only one that makes sense to me.

tiny260

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #9 on: May 26, 2011, 10:45:36 pm »
...cool! I always wondered about this kind of thing, as a favorite book of mine-"The Name of this Book is Secret"-touched down on it. Thank you very much for informing us!

 :shock: Obsessively hits the Spell Check button in fear of sounding illiterate

Sajainta

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #10 on: June 07, 2011, 07:06:39 am »
A million and a half apologies for not replying on this thread sooner!

Syna--your synesthesia sounds wonderful.  Thank you for the in-depth description!  I love talking to other synesthetes.  I think I could do it all day, haha.

You know, I'd never actually looked at the wikipedia article before-- it's incredibly comprehensive. My main source of info about synaesthesia came when a philosophy professor of mine recommended the book The Man Who Tasted Shapes.

I love that book!  I read it as a research book for a paper I wrote for my linguistics class.

So do you have a firm association of taste for each thing, or do the tastes blend into each other sometimes? Reading what you said about music makes it sound like a banquet. (Likewise with the touch of songs-- are there many different kinds? Do you experience them all as you listen to a song?) We should compare notes on a song sometime.

The tastes can blend together on occasion.  For example, if a song has both a peanut butter and chocolate taste, they'll blend together into a sort of soft, melted Reese's peanut-butter cup.

As for the touch of songs, there are a lot of different kinds.  Hot, round objects; cool, soft pebbles; cheese graters; silk; rough wood; icicles.  I experience the ones in a song as the instruments appear--if a there's a song with light drum tapping and electric guitar, I'll "feel" icicles and cheese graters simultaneously, as if I have one hand on each.  If there are a LOT of different touches, it's like I have multiple hands.  =P

Music is probably where my synaesthesia manifests most strongly. Listening to music is an intensely imaginative and visual experience for me-- honestly, probably JUST as visual as audial. For example, let's take the song "Joga" by Bjork.  It's one of my favorite songs because it evokes incredibly deep greens, in a range from darkest green-black to a more foresty teal. When I listen to the song, the greens feel as though they are streaked across my mind with an extremely thick paint, Van Gogh-thick, that's shot through with black and white. Later the feeling is punctuated (when the heavy beats come in) with round pulses of silver that kind of... ripple through the image. And (here's where I get weird) the whole thing has a kind of explosive warmth, like it's about a forest that's growing on an active volcano, with rivers of lava in subterranean caverns deep beneath the roots; so I have this sense that beneath all the green there is deep soil and earth, and something slow-moving, glowing, and hot. (Those last bits are definitely associations I'm making with the song's content, and, interestingly enough, the music video also has lava in it! I listened to the song before I saw it, so that's pretty awesome.)

I am SO jealous of synesthetes with really strong audio/visual associations!  I really wish I could see music more clearly.  It sounds absolutely wonderful.

Quote
Words are comprised of many different colours which kind of "blend" together, with the most "prominent" colour or sound dominating the rest of the word.  I know that sounds extremely strange and probably really complicated.

Makes sense to me! Most words have colors for me too. Typically, the first vowel in a word will influence its color the most, but it depends. What determines the predominant color of the word for you?

Strong consonants, usually.  B, D, R, T, or S.  And the "strongest" vowel is E, so if there's an E in the word the prominent colour will most likely be some kind of red--depending on what the other colours are.

Since you have grapheme-color synaesthesia, I'm curious if the names of people and concepts have colors distinct from their letters. For me, they do, and they supersede or blend in with the vowel colors. For instance, I have a friend named Danika. Danika on her own is a kind of light, intense, planty green to me, like a calyx. She's calm, creative, and quiet. However, she has a feistiness to her personality as well, and that combined with the first 'a' in her name gives her a kind of pinkish-red tinge. (This sort of thing makes naming characters really, really, REALLY difficult, by the way.)

I don't have that, but I know people who do.  I've had a lot of friends ask me what "colour" they are, and when I tell them that their "colour" is only associated with the colours of their name, they become rather disappointed.  =P
« Last Edit: June 08, 2011, 04:11:47 am by Sajainta »

Boo the Gentleman Caller

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #11 on: June 07, 2011, 11:30:44 am »
Saj, from what you describe, you pretty much have every form of Synesthesia there is. You realize how incredibly rare that is? Lexical -> gustatory synesthesia is rare enough, but to have it in addition to practically all the others is incredibly incredibly incredibly rare. (I was a science major for two and a half years and remember all of this from genetics / mental sciences.)

Sajainta

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #12 on: June 08, 2011, 04:51:59 am »
Saj, from what you describe, you pretty much have every form of Synesthesia there is. You realize how incredibly rare that is? Lexical -> gustatory synesthesia is rare enough, but to have it in addition to practically all the others is incredibly incredibly incredibly rare. (I was a science major for two and a half years and remember all of this from genetics / mental sciences.)

I knew that lexical--->gustatory synesthesia was one of the more rare kinds, but I didn't know that having many kinds of synesthesia was really rare.  Your comment made my day.  =)

tushantin

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Re: Synesthesia.
« Reply #13 on: February 11, 2013, 12:50:21 pm »
Sajainta, I now officially support your (and Lysa's) statement here that while Synesthesia (and Autism, for Lysa) can be classified as "disorders" that set potential capabilities below average, they can also grant you some incredible superpowers in exchange.

Thing is, this isn't just for Synesthesia, Autism and "Productive" Sociopathy (note that I emphasized "Productive", which also means "Not Criminal and Unethical"). These profound abilities are also afforded to those suffering from Dyslexia.

Since my childhood, I've often seen my Dyslexia as a curse, especially since back then nobody knew I had such a disorder and simply called me "an idiot" for not being able to cope up in educational and social fields. This led me to work four times as much as an ordinary person to even learn how to freaking spell and speak different languages, including English, which was common to my peers. My vocabulary and grammar was the worst (until one day an aunt threatened to burn my finger with candle, or cut my skin open like vegetables, if I don't practice studying and reading -- though, despite such authoritarianism, she actually helped me understand linguistics, and even creatively find ways to teach someone like me).

Despite knowing my disorder, I still lamented about being stuck with such a horrible mental illness, and envying my peers. Heck, I can't even finish a novel because of it...

Except today, I'm actually incredibly proud of being dyslexic, as well as having to work hard to cover for my shortcomings.

Utunnels often said that I must be "good at everything", and my boss called me a "Jack of All Trades", and nearly everywhere I went some people admired and said I could be a great scientist, artist, engineer, politician, lawyer, businessmen, etc. This baffled me, because all I needed was to just put a little bit of effort and I become the master of any trade, besides linguistics. I always pondered: "But it's all normal for me; don't other people possess my good traits?" Apparently, the answer to that is partly "no".

That some abilities that only the Dyslexic are blessed with, and no one else, unless they worked their passions off to acquire it as much as possible. This, I noticed, on how I could narrate the entire chronicles of my 24 planned books to my girlfriend, how they all connect, and how they are referenced to old classical literature, folklore and modern culture, from the complete overview down to the most intrinsic details -- despite not being able to "write" all of it. But even then, that was just 20% of the info I had in mind, because the other 80% I had plenty of problems in actually explaining. And even then, she fidgeted, asking me "how the heck can you come up with all that stuff?!"

How could I explain that? I always thought it was incredibly natural. It's no wonder I'm a poet at heart.

Such abilities and more still remain unexplored. I think I found a couple of pages that describe just that:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/dyslexic-advantage/
http://fp03-146.web.dircon.net/new_page_24.htm