Synaesthesia

[muon]

Some of you guys haven't watched House MD enough.

 

[Iamzod]

As you can see, some of the notes are the same as the corresponding alphabet letters, but not all of them.

Almost looks like there is a pattern there from C onwards, it appears to follow the rainbow in order pretty much.

 

[Gilly]

Some of you guys haven't watched House MD enough.

I thought I'd watched them all but can't remember that being covered?!

 

[muon]

I thought I'd watched them all but can't remember that being covered?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_(House)

I think it comes up in other episodes as quickly dismissed theories.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

Almost looks like there is a pattern there from C onwards, it appears to follow the rainbow in order pretty much.

Yeah, and my ABC are red green and blue which are the primary colours. It's like colour associations, but whatever they end up being will stick/remain for the rest of my life. They don't change. Another synaesthete will have their own palette of colours (so that it's arbitrary), but again will stick for the rest of their life.

 

[BloodyL]

If all I can smell is green, does that make me a synaesthetic?

 

[Angilion]

Without offending anyone i always thought it was a load of tat. I don't have anything similar to this at all, so i always thought people just made it up because i can't even visualize the feeling myself.[..]

You don't have to be able to visualise it to understand it. You just need to understand this: we do not sense reality directly. Everything that we perceive as being sensory input about the world around us is actually signals in our brains. If you bear that it mind, it's not so strange that input from one set of sensors could be copied to two processing areas and thus processed as two senses and presented to your consciousness as two sensory inputs.

I've had it temporarily due to a drug. Perhaps the strangest thing about it is that it isn't strange. Your brain is presenting processed sensory input to your consciousness, which is normal so you don't find it strange. That's true even for temporary induced synaesthesia.

 

[Anchundan]

Why have you posted the same thing three times?

 

[Anchundan]

The problem is, the type of synaesthesia I encounter is heavily colour-oriented. This is a problem due to my colourblindness and a lack of a test capable of fully diagnosing my condition without being reliant on true colour perception.

Colourblindness is another thing that is largely misunderstood. Most people I have discussed synaesthesia with haven't even heard of it but most are aware of colourblindness even if they are ignorant of the true meaning of it. The response tends to be 'Oh, you're colourblind? What colour is this then?' *holds up random object*

More militant or irritable colourblind people have been known to follow that question up with another question, along the lines of 'if I were in a wheelchair would you ask me to stand?' I don't go in for that sort of histrionics but it is a sort of a disability in that it's something that I and others can't do that most people can.

I took the test, but failed. I don't have synaesthesia. But I am colour vision deficient. Not too badly, but it does affect me. They have labelled me as red/green colour vision deficient. But I wish there was a better way to define it in this day and age. For me certain shades of green, brown, orange all look identical. I would love to find a way to define an envelope of the colours I can't distinguish, say in the RGB number system.

Often, when I don't know what a colour is, or when I am trying to match up colours so they are the same, I will use Photoshop and find out the RGB values. Is it possible you can do something similar, when you see a colour and hear a sound, you can take a photo of that colour and break down it's RGB value, then note the sound? Maybe that word start to form a pattern - maybe even help you know the colours you are seeing because of the sounds you hear...

 

[Angilion]

Why have you posted the same thing three times?

No idea. I wrote it, clicked on "submit" and the website timed out. I couldn't even log out.

 

[Scuzi]

Interesting post. I didn't really relate to it until I did the test and seen "or the sense of a shape being triggered by a taste" in the last question. I get this with smell and taste a lot.

Cooked cheese is square. Citrus is a straight line. Tomato is Z. Freshly cut grass is a triangle. Bread is H. Bad breath is F. Stale beer (the way it smells next day after being spilled) is a rectangle with rounded corners. White wine is Q. The list goes on. I continue to discover new associations.

Some patterns I have noticed:
These sensations are extremely intense in the hours subsequent to recovery from a migraine.
I have a recurring dream (usually quite lucid) about eating plastic (like an old TV remote control). After waking up from that dream, the sensations are intensified.
Chronic sleep deprivation skews it. I'm the weeks after my first son was born, my senses and the associated sensations were all over the place. E.g the smell of petrol which is normally a very pointed isosceles triangle became an oval.

I thought I was just mental. It's somewhat reassuring to see that this has wider recognition.

 

[MookJong]

The albums that I listened to a lot in my teens have colours associated with them and with some albums all the songs have their own colour. I don't know if this is Synaesthesia or not.

The colour charts above look like how I would think of a track listing.

 

[Efour]

I experienced this but only experimenting with lsd in my youth. Standing on a train platform the squeeling of metal train wheels would produce vivid yellow lines for example.

I think it would be very useful to an artist or composer especially.