Synesthesia

Post Reply New Topic

I'm not sure if this applies or not.
For me many words have a shape, a slight taste or smell and a sometimes a feeling of my body "image" forming a position although I don't move.

eg "orange" is a rectangular rough lozenge with no taste and a feeling of looking over the left shoulder with elbows raised.
"wrong" is a twisted piece of black metal with a copper taste
"index" is a white cylindrical stone with a chalk smell
"general" is a brown pleated short skirt with a feeling of hips turning to the left

Not sure if its synaesthesia, normal, or weird.

Indeed.

I do have music -> color synesthesia (and many sounds have color as well). Human voices have textures. I am not sure why I react differently to different kinds of sounds, but I think processing music is a different part of the brain than processing speech.

However, I also have color -> flavor synesthesia

I have something going on with smells. I rarely think about it, but I realized I experience smells with things like stretching, or grinding or flooding or other notions.

I am not sure that I have mirror touch synesthesia, but I have some experiences that are like it, and it's not restricted to seeing other people touched. I've experienced this sense of "mirror touch" from animals, emoticons, video game characters (human or not) and of course other people. Earlier today I saw an emoticon that had hearts spinning around the head: and I literally felt like things were crawling around my head.

Another one is a sense of objects being alive. I've seen people describe this and they perceive objects as having a personality and an identity. I read about one woman who said her TV was a young boy and she couldn't bear to watch pornography on that television because the boy was too young for that. For me, it's different, there's no personality, although I would say there is some identity, or perhaps purpose. Like a fan's purpose is to move air, or headphones' purpose is to play sounds for you. And it seems to me rather sad when something breaks and can no longer fulfill that purpose. I am not sure that this is synesthesia, either. It might be something else.

I've been fairly conservative about accepting that I have synesthesia in the first place, and I only really accepted it because pensieve said "If that's what happens you do have it" but I still am skeptical about each type that I notice, no matter how often I notice.

I also think that it is less intense than it used to be. When I was a child, I remember colors had fairly intense flavors and a couple of them actually made me ill. Now, either due to reduced intensity or familiarity, these colors are annoying, but not sickening.

I suspect that color-related synesthesia is rather evocative for people who don't have it, especially when it's something like music -> color. I know I've talked about what I see when I listen to music and friends and acquaintances have expressed envy about it. People seem more enthralled by grapheme -> color, too.

I just realized other people didnt visualize the words when people are talking (ticker-tape synesthesia). That's why I'm new to this conversation.

I've never heard of someone else who has this! Most of the time, the only way I can understand spoken language is by converting the sounds into written words, which then scroll across my field of vision. I also have color-grapheme synesthesia, so for me, the letters in those ticker-tape words are in color.

It works the same in reverse. Usually, the only way I know what to say is to first write what I want to say onto the ticker-tape, and then read the words aloud.

The only times that (I think) I'm not relying on this process is when I get into something really, super interesting to me in a good conversation with someone who is also excited about what I'm saying. Then the whole ticker-tape process seems to fade and I start speaking more intuitively.

This frankly does not make sense. How did you speak before you learned how to read (which I am assuming was not until the first grade)?

I have no idea. I just know I do it now, and have for as long as I can remember.

I put the words together visually, and I even see the sentence structure kind of diagrammed out like we learned in school. I didn't learn diagramming until well into school, so I guess before that I didn't know to pay attention to sentence structure.

But I really don't know how to respond verbally until I can see the sentence...unless I'm talking about something really exciting, like I said before, and then the words just sort of flow on their own. In those rare instances, I don't know what I'm going to say until the words come out of my mouth.

I didn't talk much when I was little...maybe it's partly because I felt so insecure in using verbal language? I did a lot of watching people instead of talking with them.

I have non-color synesthesia, and am not autistic. I perceive something like personalities in objects and numbers. I can also do math in like three dimensional geometric objects. I don't know if that counts. I have had to ignore it and simply memorize the procedures in math classes in order to be on the same page as everyone else. I might get the answer by, say, "folding and turning it," which is not something you can get credit for.