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Do you have Synesthesia?

flexy

flexy

Diamond Member
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

"Stimulation of one sensory pathway (...) leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway."

Like in...people who "experience" numbers, letters, words, months, days of the weeks etc. as having colors/shapes. Or sounds as having shapes or colors etc.

I am having a hard time figuring out whether I have Synesthesia since the tests on the web are not clear ...and another I took just took me so long I aborted it 🙂

I don't know how they define "leads to an experience"...say do they mean if someone hear, thinks or sees "3" and I say it is "green", do those people actually PERCEIVE the color green...or merely "in their mind" as I do.

Some definition about Synesthesia was like that one difference between just "a lively imagination" and actual synesthesia is that the "experience" is repeatable and consistent. (Say I "associate" the number three with "green", it does so ever since and I won't see it as "red" next month)

What I know is..that for me letters, sounds, numbers, months, days etc. are associated with colors and shapes and they do that every since I can think.
Monday=green, Tuesday=orange, Wednesday= lighter green etc.
5= green, 4=orange and so forth.

Low frequencies, certain instruments are always "round" and rather "dark", higher frequencies bright. Noise is indeed "gray/white". If I hear music or sound I can make a mental picture of how the sound is "arranged", almost like using some software which displays me a spectrum of the music. I can "see" layers of the sounds in my mind, but here too...of course I don't get an actual visual image popping up...it's a mental image.

So do I have Synesthesia? Do you have Synesthesia? Or is it just normal that people associate, say, numbers with colors, or sounds with shapes? I always thought it's normal and all people do that.
 
Ex-girfriend has it. Sees colors when she smells anything or hears music. It isn't just in your mind, you actually see it involuntarily.


If you want synesthesia, drop some acid.
 
2 Things from myself that have stemmed from epilepsy:

Commonly before seizures I get what is referred to as an "aura" indicating a seizure may be imminent. For me, those auras are simply an all-of-a-sudden rush of fear. Imagine you're sitting around watching TV and all of a sudden you're in a horror movie and someone is trying to kill you... yet you have no idea why.

Second, I've also had issues prior to a seizure where I will get an odd-smell all of a sudden.
 
As most people, I don't know for sure.

While I don't believe this example is synesthesia, it could be a similar phenomenon.

I do have some weird sensations sometimes. My hands, for example, can feel like giant balloons. It is completely nerve/brain related. There is no pain or discomfort, it's just a feeling.

The Pink Floyd song Comfortably Numb lyrics, "My hands felt just like two balloons" describes it perfectly.
 
Hearing, seeing or thinking the word quicksilver has always given me a funny feeling in my head, nose and mouth. The song silver sipper from a kids show (electric company?) does the same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erES3Elxm18

I think it's from when I saw my father playing with mercury from a broken thermometer when I was young.
 
not i, but the girlfriend, and my brothers girlfriend do.
mine said that letters are numbers are different colored to her.
sounds annoying, to be honest.
 
s0me0nesmind1 said:
2 Things from myself that have stemmed from epilepsy:

Commonly before seizures I get what is referred to as an "aura" indicating a seizure may be imminent. For me, those auras are simply an all-of-a-sudden rush of fear. Imagine you're sitting around watching TV and all of a sudden you're in a horror movie and someone is trying to kill you... yet you have no idea why.

Second, I've also had issues prior to a seizure where I will get an odd-smell all of a sudden.
Click to expand...

i used to smell oranges in simple partials back when i had them. the strongest sweetest orange smell in the world. it was a glorious smell.

but that's not synesthesia, just seizures. the only reason i associate colors with numbers is remembering the old QBasic colors codes.
 
A former acquaintance has it. She saw music as colors. Different colors conveyed emotion as well. We tried experimenting with it by listening to original songs and then a cover song. And yes, the different renditions brought different colors. For example, she'd never heard the song 'Diamonds and Rust' by Joan Baez. She wrote the song about her relationship with Bob Dylan and the hurt it caused. I sent her of youtube of the original (which evoked a lot of red, which she associated with pain). Then I sent her a cover by Blackmore's Night - totally different color mix (can't remember exactly what). We chatted on the phone several times as well and she said that my voice would sometimes come across as blue and silver, which is fascinating as those are 2 of my favorite colors - and she had no idea of that until I told her after the fact. She loved that I saw it as fascinating rather that freakish, like most of her family and friends thought.
 
DaveStall said:
That 1% must be made up of (ex/current) girlfriends and spouses of ATOT members.

I always thought the number 69 smelled a little fishy. Maybe it's just me.
Click to expand...

well, mine is a math whiz and was only able to memorize Pi out to 300-some digits...probably because only 2 or 4 numbers have associated colors.

Using "lucid" to classify that which is not synesthetic is interesting. It is both accurate and quite ignorant, and of course this depends on perspective.

"Clearly expressed--easy to understand." Surely, a condition which, on the surface, is classified by a crossing of wires in which normally isolated senses are interpreted in a dual or complementary fashion, sounds like something that would muddle one's perception. Too much information to wade through makes it difficult to define a single line of interpretation.

That's fair, I think, when one considers the outright limits of human sensory perception of the natural world that surrounds them. Or rather, when one considers the brain's natural tendency to silence a vast majority of that information, despite it's capability, to interpret the world in a fashion most advantageous for the type of prey species that we are--quick, concise burst of info that can generate an instant response on the go.

But that isn't the entire story. Of course we already know that not all senses are isolated: smell and taste are very much linked. So much so that taste is far more dependent on "smell" (our nose and what it does), than it is on "taste" (what he have long thought our tastebuds to be doing, but really aren't doing). One must also consider that the interlinking of traditionally disparate sensory information really isn't a handicap; it has, in fact, been shown in studies to allow a far more diverse and far more illuminated understanding of the information being presented.

This is why "ultrasynysthates" are able to instantly memorize number matrices of extreme complexity-the additional layer that associates a color scaffold to an arrangement of numbers seems far more illuminating (that other definition of lucid), than not having it.

I think this is why such conditions, as rare as they are, do tend to be found in that famously rare population of 1%rs: wunderkinds. Composers, artists, math geniuses, etc.
 
brianmanahan said:
i used to smell oranges in simple partials back when i had them. the strongest sweetest orange smell in the world. it was a glorious smell.

but that's not synesthesia, just seizures. the only reason i associate colors with numbers is remembering the old QBasic colors codes.
Click to expand...

Is It? Who knows. It just seems rather similar. I'm curious on the science behind it all. The below quote was interesting as far as its relation to epilepsy.

Cytowic and Eagleman find support for the disinhibition idea in the so-called acquired forms[3] of synesthesia that occur in non-synesthetes under certain conditions: temporal lobe epilepsy, head trauma, stroke, and brain tumors.
Click to expand...
 
Don't think so. I suppose certain numbers, sounds, tastes, etc. have associations in my mind with other sensory experiences, but I'm not actually experiencing them as different sensory input.
 
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