November 22, 2006

• Interesting. I remember reading "The mind of a mnemonist" by Luria, which mentioned similar issues in one of his subjects back in the fifties (I think).
• Wow. Gives new meaning to so many expressions, like "I could eat those words" or "I really savored that book." What happens when they read a cookbook? Would they be able to pre-taste the dishes???
• Synesthesia is fascinating. I've heard of people seeing music as shapes, and one synesthete described the iTunes visualisation as accurate.
• But how awful would it be if you're enjoying a nice chocolate mousse and someone at the next table starts shouting the word that makes you taste tuna fish? You'd have to eat with earplugs in.
• An earlier thread related to synesthesia.
• Weird! I awlays thought that was just me! Especially the rhyming bit. "Custard" and "Mustard" have always been a bit of an issue. I've always had synaesthesia, though I didn't have a word for it until high school. (Except maybe "loony.") It's never been overwhelming, but it's always there. Letters, words, numbers, even abstract concepts all have colors, sounds, smells, and/or tastes irrevocably associated with them. But cince I have a very poor sense of taste and smell to begin with, and the pleasure of eating comes mostly from texture, the taste memory isn't as satisfying as actually eating.
• I thought everyone was like this, and just didn't talk about it, until I mentioned it to family members and got really strange looks. Then I thought it was just something a bit off with me until I read about synaesthesia as an adult. I think mine must be mild. Not every word or phoneme has a taste, and the sensation isn't as vivid as actually eating food.
• The only such thing I have ever noticed is an occasional inability to differentiate between the letter "F" and the number "5". In reviewing my work, I'll 5ind that I have used the number "5" in place o5 an "F" once in a while. Am I 5uckin' nuts?
• That was an interesting link - I don't think I've heard of this before, specifically as a syndrome. How strange the ways our brains work.
• How quaint the way of human brains, When colors waft through music's strains. A word can make a taste, a taste With words or numbers may be laced. A purple day, a cherry "C" - How quaint these brains of human be!
• My synesthesia seemed to be associated with a 3 or 4 year period when I was starting to read and wrestling with penmanship and changed ways of perceiving and interpreting. It was never severe and was associated with my learning things like the names of days of the week and the months of the year and the alphabet and such. (H was a white rocking-horse with blue-grey spots and a black mane and tail.) Died out after a few years. Or maybe I learned other ways of focusing? Who knows.
• I also always thought my synesthesia was just the way all people saw and understood things. I don't have the taste version, though, and I think I'm just as glad. But all numbers, letters, words, people, places, names and concepts have a color, shape, luminance and texture. Ralph, I don't know if all people experience the F and 5 thing, but I know that it's not unique to you. As well as C and 6. This knowledge is based on many years of having to enter long strings of hex code encryption keys. Those two sets of letters/numbers are my most common mixups, and are also the most common for many that I work with.
• I'd rather have the letters/colors kind. It seems like it would make the world more interesting. :-)
• I'm not sure if I'd want to have synesthesia full time, but wouldn't it be wonderful to experience it for an hour?
• bees, it really died out? I find that sad. Do you miss it? Your brain appears to work in such marvelous ways, anyway :)
• How odd/fascinating/cool that there are so many of you here -- is synesthesia not as rare as I thought, or does it correlate with other brain/personality traits that would explain it? Or are there any brain/personality traits that explain why any particular person ends up on MoFi? Or did I just get up too early this morning and need more coffee?
• I don't have this, myself, and I'll confess to being slightly jealous; but I suppose poetry at its best can give one an idea of what it might be like.
• ...is synesthesia not as rare as I thought, or does it correlate with other brain/personality traits that would explain it? I think it's because rarity is dictated by the records. It is possible that things which people do not percieve as problematic would go unmentioned in the record due to the lack of someone identifying it as something pertinent to discuss with a professional who would record it. Like VeraGemini and Lara, for example, thinking it was a fact of human sensation instead of an uncommon occurance. Last I checked there wasn't a check box on the Canada census form which said can you sense words with your sense of taste? I would have checked yes, of course; they taste inky on paper and dusty on cars.
• Lara, now and then I still have a flash of it, but not very often. However, as that dwindled away, I became aware of another thing. Whatever people around me said, I started to see - as if each word and pause was being typed onto a layer of air in black ink, words complete with punctuation. And I can still do this if I think about it, though when I was a boy I seemed to simply experience it. Dunno what the word for this is, but it seemed to start up as the synesthesia faded. And this also happened around the same time I began to have many lucid dreams. The speech-texting-in-air thing seems similar to dream lucidity in that that both experiences involve apperception, where you do do something and yet while doing it a part of your mind stands off to one side, watching you do whatever. Watching the words appear in air, or realizing you're dreaming even as you dream on. If that makes any sense.

  Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) Apperception \Ap`per*cep"tion\, n. [Pref. ad- + perception: cf. F. apperception.] (Metaph.) The mind's perception of itself as the subject or actor in its own states; perception that reflects upon itself ....

• Deliciously related NYTimes article (in spirit, if not in fact).