Tasting colours? (synesthesia)

Blissful is pink and Blues is definately black. (Blue is blue. Blues is black. Most colours are what they are or similar to what they are. But there are a few exceptions, like crimson, lavander and all those weird names…)

Sonia is a grey colour.

/me wonders what’s the point of wanting to know how your name is seen by a weird person :tongue:

After all, anyone can give opinions on that, only my opinions are irrational and most people’s have some underlying reason. Which would make BlissfulBlues a tough name not to label blue…

There are several German pasta commercials where the German tennis star Steffi Graf promotes her Italian Spaghetti cook Bruno.

Guess it´s some horoscope like thing, you get a piece of information that might or might not have a background and try to fit it into the picture you got from yourself. You can always interpret it the way that seems nice. Orange and white? That means I am a warm and friendly yet also intelligent person :wink:
To ask someone who isn´t a synaesthet isn´t as much fun, cause he isn´t so sure about what he says and also cause we understand how he does it, nothing mysterious about it.

But a bit more serious, I also like to check wether different persons think of the same colours. Btw, my girlfriend (hi :smile: ) , who says that she isn´t really a synaesthet but also often associates senses with other senses, thinks that martin is brown and red/orange.

Math - fuschia
Science - blue
History - yellow
Reading - dark blue
English - red

Martin is a light blue. Tapir is a sort of light-yellowish ochre.

You’re synæsthete and lefty? :shock: If you tell me you were taught to write with the right hand, I’ll be scared out of my body! :scared:

Actually it’s really weird… writing and eating are just about the only things I do left-handed; everything else is right-handed. Rather, I can eat right-handed, but it’s uncomfortable. Writing with my right hand takes me ages and almost always comes out unreadable.

I picked my shirt because I thought it tasted like orange sherbert

but that’s because it looks like it!

Edit: Woah, didn’t see there is a second page of discussion here. ehm, just take it as if this post was at the end of the first page :razz:

Mh, not necessarily every cross-sense connection means you are synastaethic.
For example:

Math is red for me. That’s clear, nothing to change about. But if i think about it i have to realize that my first math classbooks (< does this word exist? I think about the thin ones to write in, how are they named in english?) were red.

Same thing for example for Sonia. Sonia is clearly a yellow name. But, thinking about it, I make the connection in German: Sonne (That’s sun) is written similar to Sonja/Sonnja/Sonnia (That’s the german equivalent of the name.) It also sounds similar in german. Therefore the connection.

So: You don’t have it, if the effect is limited. I think there is no fixed border. But to a synasthaetic, the effect will occur everytime with every word or thing or… whatever. It’s remarkable, and there seems not to be a clear sense behind it. Also, they don’t have to think about it.

If i think “hmm, what color could “french” as a subject have?” my subconcious will give me a color, be it based on something or just random.

Synasthaetics also connect other senses (though colors are common). One could associate a taste with a feeling. “Uh, that tastes rather silky/pointed/hard” or “that feels sour/sweet/bitter.”

Anyways, it would interest me to try in my dreams. i could ask my subconciousness to show me why french seems blue to me. g

And a question: Do capital letters make a difference?

is “Marc” different from “marc” or “mArC” ? (and what color is it anyways, that’s my name :razz:)

^^ i get really interested in such things ^^

I first heard someone saying that a color tastes like something is on The Simpson’s and on Family Guy. It happens to me, sometimes when I drink something I say ‘This tastes like blue’.

2 months does not make a topic dead. merged into existing topic
edit: haha, okay, i hadn’t seen the last 3 posts, posts before that were of 2006,

i know there have been topics on this, but they died ages ago, but anyway, i’ve fairly recently become interested in synesthesia, which is, mixing of senses, i have read somewhere that it is comparable to seeing auras in the way that all young children possess the ability, but unlearn it(or desensitize from it) around the age of 4(at least, 1999 out of 2000), so i took a test for it last monday, did not expect to have syn, but got these results:
Element 1. Round 2. Round Value
A Blue Blue RIGHT
J Yellow Yellow RIGHT
U Brown Brown RIGHT
R Orange Orange RIGHT
B Red Red RIGHT
E Yellow Yellow RIGHT
G Green Green RIGHT
M Blue Green OK
8 Green Green RIGHT
3 Orange Orange RIGHT
2 Blue Blue RIGHT
Tue Red Yellow FALSE
Thu Green Orange FALSE
Sept Blue Blue RIGHT
7 Green Yellow OK

and tested it again today, with these results:

Element 1. Round 2. Round Value
A Blue Blue RIGHT
J Green Green RIGHT
U Brown Brown RIGHT
R Orange Blue FALSE
B Red Red RIGHT
E Yellow Yellow RIGHT
G Green Green RIGHT
M Blue Green OK
8 Orange Blue FALSE
3 Orange Orange RIGHT
2 Yellow Yellow RIGHT
Tue Yellow Yellow RIGHT
Thu Red Red RIGHT
Sept Blue Red FALSE
7 Blue Blue RIGHT

which was a shock, seeing as most colors match up pretty darned well, especially considering i do not usually associate colors with letters, (having read older topics, i suppose bruno can talk about this XD)

I was watching a TV show on science channel about synesthesia people.

They said that when someone or something make’s a sound you can see the colors with that sound. Like School, the first letter is Green the o’s are gray and the l is yellow or something like this.

When the person tasted something bitter, they saw gray or something like that.

So do you actually see the colors? If you don’t then you might not have synesthesia.

first, a disclaimer. i don’t pass the consistency check for long-term periods. as i said in this post, some things tend to change. mostly stuff related to names of people, places, that kind of name. (conversely, pomegrenades have been golden ever since learnt their name in English — in that sense i pass the consistency check, just as with those dull “give a colour to each letter of the alphabet” questionaires). but names of people, those tend to change. reason is i’m not a proper synæsthete; synæsthesia is to me a symptom to me of something bigger (my PM buddies know of a couple of other things that are symptoms to this exact same condition: —my poet and my demon). enough with disclaimer, lets try to get this through to you people.

visualise an apple. really, follow me here: visualise an apple. have it in your hands. feel the strength of its material, the smoothness of its outside, its sweet and subtle smell. picture yourself biting it. the juice leaking away, the sound of your bite, its internal consistency and texture, its smell. i think everyone here can, without much effort, visualise one of these parts more or less vividly. some people can really feel the consistency of the apple against their hands. others can reconstruct the smell to the point of feeling their stomachs grumble and their spine shiver from the sweetness. other people can really feel the texture of the apple bite against their tongue.

regardless of what aspect or aspects of this visualisation you can reconstruct the best, i think there is a sense in which we can all agree that reconstruction was very vivid (if you put some effort, it was more vivid than you usually think yourself capable of) and there is a sense in which it was just a trace, something on the background — a reconstruction, after all.

this is what the synæsthete experiences. some more or less vividly than in a visualisation exercise, but the feeling is just the same in nature. i think we can all agree it is not the same as seeing an apple in front of you, or actually feeling its taste just as if you had it on your mouth. it’s more like experiencing the redness as a hint, out of your visual field, or like experiencing a strong memory of a taste — strong enough to even generate some collateral reaction in your system, the shiver, the stomach, but not strong enough to trick you into believing there’s an apple in your mind.

this is the basic idea. i think this also helps see why asking “do you see the colour” is a bad question. because the synæsthete is tempted to reply “well, yes and no”. you do visualise, but see? see involves projecting it somewhere. sure, that classical stereotype of seeing colours to letters makes confusion simple enough: the synæsthete could arguably see the letter coloured their personal way! but what about music? where in your vision field will you project what you visualise with music, shall you be that kind of synæsthete? it makes no sense, mm? getting a synæsthete to try and explain what’s going is rather frustrating, as there’s no agreement on what vocabulary to use or what distinctions to make:

“it’s not that i see the colours, i experience them: i see them! …no! i mean, i don’t ‘see’ see them, i just— i can see them, but not with my sight, i see them somewhere else…”

it’s endless, confusing and terribly frustrating. i hope i’ve helped you guys understand the basic drill though. in my words (which are by no means a scientific distinction, just a way to help here), synæsthesia is about visualisation, rather than sight, or in broader terms, reconstruction, rather than factual experience. factual experience would’ve been what we call psychotic hallucinations: believing you actually have an apple in your mouth? that would be very confusing, and make synæsthesia suddenly some clinical “condition” comparable to, yes, psychosis.

~ * ~

edit: what’s going on here

on a more scientifical note, the brain scans show activity in the parts of the brain relative to the sensation being reconstructed. so one might say the experience is real: you do see the red, somewhere out of your vision field, but you see it, you see it with the “vision” area of your brain. then again, visualisations and (since we’re in this forum) dreams also light up those parts of the brain. the fact your experience is in no way projected onto the real world, as a hallucination would, tricking you into confusing reality and other kinds of experience, is key to understanding what’s going on, though.

That…is freakin awesome. I would perform a sense “enhancing” ritual and then I would listen to this: Peaches en Regalia

That would be something to experience.

there’s 2 types of syn, associative and projecting, projecting is least common, which is actually seeing, associative is just associating A with blue, but not actually seeing the A as a blue letter
edit: didn’t see later posts, and bruno, i am not good at visualising, best i can do is seeing the apple

Could the associative aspect of synesthesia be linked with OLP? (Ordinal linguistic personification = numbers/letters/days/months/etc. have personalities) It’s been suggested [size=75](on wiki)[/size] that they are indeed similar… Because I’m a little confused. :tongue: I have OLP, but I also have a couple synes-type color associations with certain numbers and sounds.

Do you remember the title of the documentary? I’d love to tivo a rerun! :content:

I actually do exactly the same thing with my classes.

Math: Yellow
English: Orange
Science: Red
History: Green
French: Blue

I’ve known about this for a while now, but I just now saw the post about “associative” synesthesia. I’ve thought for a while that maybe I had synesthesia in some form or another. Now I think that if I do, it’s definitely associative. To me, the letter “A” happens to seem red, whereas “B” is blue, “C” is yellow, “D” is burnt red/brown…and the same thing goes with numbers, words and days of the week. “That” seems brown/red to me…the number “6” is orange-yellow…somehow, some things vary for me, though. I dunno why, but maybe one time I’ll think that “Wednesday” is purple, then I’ll think it’s blue. It’s pretty interesting to have someone say a word and then see what color I think of, though. :razz:
Oh, and my classes kinda have colors too. From this past year, it was like…
Programming: blue
Gym: yellow/orange
Band: blue/black
Math: red or blue
History: red or blue (whichever one isn’t already Math at the time)
English: yellow
Science: green

OLP is often found in combination with number/letter-based synesthesia, at least, i think so

Wow, I think I have synesthesia… Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always “seen” sound. Sometimes it would be a firework, sometimes it would be a fountain, sometimes it would be a series of fibers… all within a rainbow of colors… Makes playing my clarinet in Band rather trippy =D My clarinet’s sound is forest green in the shape of a round tube… or a noodle or something. Saxophones look like flower petals, Flutes look like spritzes of water, trumpets look like chalky marks, and tubas look like large hazy blurs… When the whole band plays together it all kind of forms a rainbow shape… or a river, all the parts flowing within each other. I can actually SEE when someone is sticking out or becoming out of tune. Helps a lot with my own intonation =3

One of my favorite things to do is just sit with my eyes closed listening to birdsong or sounds of my neighborhood. It literally looks like I’m watching Fantasia…

It never gets in the way, though. Sort of like… if the images were transparent and I was looking through them. Sometimes I can ignore them altogether. It’s certainly not unpleasant, though =3

wat if u associate smells with experiences or memorys? cant really explain, but is that synaesthesia?