As a result, a person with synesthesia can see sound in the form of color. So, each note of the scale has it's own specific color. When played in a cord, they're seen as a band of colors.

And they can taste sound. Perhaps C tastes bitter, or G tastes salty, or maybe F tastes sweet.

Synesthesia is actually where sayings like "bitter wind" or "prickly laugh" come from.

I suppose living with it would be kind of hard sometimes.

I mean, you could never go to clubs. I heard that when music has a lot of bass in it, you see lots of little black boxes and it doesn't taste very good... and every time phone rings or someone talks you would be bombarded by strands of color...

I still think it would be cool. Like your own personal light show.

I can definitely imagine colors, but I'm not forcibly shown colors when I hear sound.

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since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things;
will never wholly kiss you.

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It sounds like someone who's on ecstasy or acid or something.

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lol, that's what I thought at first too. But it's more consistent. Every time you hear a G you see the same color. It's not like the colors you see are completely random. It's more like a mathematic function... you can never have two different values of y for the same value of x. Where as acid and ecstasy are kind of unpredictable.

It's not something that you actually see literally on the page. At least for me it isn't. I think most people aren't hallucinating actual things in their environment. They just perceive it. It's something you perceive in your mind's eye, as if in the back of your head.
For me names have colour, and it's the vowels that give colour to the name, then the consonants next to the vowels usually get the colour from their neighbours. Sometimes I even find myself judging the look of a name and if it's a good sounding name or not because of its colours. It's hard to explain.

I always thought everybody had this type of wiring in their minds but it turns out it's not as common as I thought when I looked into it. But it's still pretty common.

If you think about a number or a letter, to you,....what's the colour, or the smell, or the shape, or the movement, that you, without any rational explanation, give to that number? or letter, or name?
You can't just make it up now. It has to be something that always was for you. It's just an involutary connection in your brain. It's just something that is.

That's synesthesia basically. The most common is number/letter(which are graphemes)-colour synesthesia.

Post edited at 8:11 am on June 29, 2008 by TooImaginativeTeen

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I have that.
Two me the concept of 2 was always green and number 3 was always yellow and 5 is pink and 8 is dark green and 6 is orange. Then 'a' is red and 'i' is yellow and 'u' is purple. 'm' is toasty yellow and musical tunes are movements in 3d space. I remember having these connections in my head since very early. I remember kindergarten and thinking that 2 was green. To me, 2 being yellow sounds wrong.

It's not something that you actually see literally on the page. At least for me it isn't. I think most people aren't hallucinating  actual things in their environment. They just perceive it. It's something you perceive in your mind's eye, as if in the back of your head.
For me names have colour, and it's the vowels that give colour to the name, then the consonants next to the vowels usually get the colour from their neighbours. Sometimes I even find myself judging the look of a name and if it's a good sounding name or not because of its colours. It's hard to explain.

I always thought everybody had this type of wiring in their minds but it turns out it's not as common as I thought when I looked into it. But it's still pretty common.

If you think about a number or a letter, to you,....what's the colour, or the smell, or the shape, or the movement, that you, without any rational explanation, give to that number? or letter, or name?
You can't just make it up now. It has to be something that always was for you. It's just an involutary connection in your brain. It's just something that is.

That's synesthesia basically. The most common is number/letter(which are graphemes)-colour synesthesia.

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That's amazing. :) It's so exciting to hear from someone who actually has it. Thank-you for sharing your experiences with me.

new york is orange to me

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♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

For example watermelon is giddy and bubbly, and I can't see the number nine being anything except incredibly mean. Nine is a bully in my mind.

I don't think that counts as synesthesia, though. I think it's just me having a hyper-active imagination.

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Well, I tend to give things personalities, I have ever since I can remember.

For example watermelon is giddy and bubbly, and I can't see the number nine being anything except incredibly mean. Nine is a bully in my mind.

I don't think that counts as synesthesia, though. I think it's just me having a hyper-active imagination.

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Well, if 9 to you was ALWAYS a bully, then that is likely to be a form of synesthesia.
I have seen a person who gave personalities to graphemes in a documentary about it, so it's likely that you have form of it.
In my case, I find it hard to give a peronality to some object or letter without having to THINK about it, and ending up with something like the live furniture from Disney's "Beauty and the Beast". That you could call hyper-active imagination.

The thing about it is that you can't think about it, the letter or number JUST HAS TO BE that colour, or personality or smell. You can't really explain it why. Your explanation ought to be an innocent shrug.
Synesthesia isn't imaginative. There's no creativity in bringging about these connections.
For me three is always yellow and 6 is orange, but I never thoguht about "mhmmm, let's see....6 is....orange because I once saw 6 oranges in my table and that is..." No.
Actually to imagine 6 oranges is more stable to me than 6 lemons. It actually confuses me.
Two yellos lemons awkwardly don't  look 100% "right", because their colour is conflciting with 2, for me, being green.
It's hard to explain.

Here's a test. Does imagining 9 as a caring bubbly number sound good to you? Does it sound wrong?
If so, it's like me and my number-colour setting. Anything deviating from that specific sequence of colours, just looks wrong to me.
another. What about a pair of scissors, what sort of personality does that have in your mind?