I have this problem too, although I get a taste of vomit and the stench of decay and destruction.

Slow news day? If you told me this was from The Onion I would believe you.

I had something sort of like this as a child. Not with literal taste, though, just in my mind. It made my picture books amazing.

I still associate different numbers with colors, different letters with moods, etc.

I've always been fascinated by synesthesia.
My friend had it with music + colour.
Decent musician + composer but, sadly, not a visual artist.
Would have loved to see what his songs looked like to him.

Whenever I see Hillary Clinton, I taste the tears of 1 million scared children.

The letter "R" is definitely a satin-brushed chrome color.

Jeez, this is news?

When i think of Angelina Jolie, i taste sugar.

/wait what?

Spider Dijon: I've always been fascinated by synesthesia.

THIS x 1000.

dlindsay21: When i think of Angelina Jolie, i taste sugar.

When I taste Angelina Jolie, I think of a peach.

/I could eat a peach for hours.

God, that's the lamest example of synaesthesia I've ever heard.

On the other hand it must be super easy to prank this guy once you learn which words make him taste sweat or rotten eggs or cilantro.

Tastes like chicken!!

I know a girl who sees numbers in color. I used to quiz her to make sure she wasn't making it up. She says that until she was in about 4th grade or so, she thought that's just how numbers were.

YOu don't have to have synesthesia to taste shiat in your mouth every time you see Bush.

The color of a consonant for me is related to its phonetic quality.

Unvoiced stops are blue, unvoiced fricatives are red, voiced stops are green, unvoiced stops are orange, semi-vowels are yellow (perhaps because both semi-vowels are found in the world yellow), other consonants are brown.

Funny headline,

Seeing Hillary reminds me of really nasty looking scrambled eggs. Barak on the other hand reminds me of that drink that looks exactly like a chocolate shake, tastey and sweet but when you drink it, it turns out to be one of those nasty tasting weightloss shakes.

Tastes bad and does nothing to make things better

I have synesthesia minorly. I hear colours in different words. I saw a painting done by someone who heard colours and It was really cool.

/Also sometimes when a girl asks what her name sounds like sometimes you have to BS because its like this horrid green pink brown thing.

libbynomore2: Funny headline,

Seeing Hillary reminds me of really nasty looking scrambled eggs. Barak on the other hand reminds me of that drink that looks exactly like a chocolate shake, tastey and sweet but when you drink it, it turns out to be one of those nasty tasting weightloss shakes.

Tastes bad and does nothing to make things better

So how does Grandpa McCain's penis taste?

When I see Hillary or Bush I get the smell and taste of Durians...

If you do not know what a Durian is look it up.

Fluff Girl: Slow news day? If you told me this was from The Onion I would believe you.

This is a very real condition. It happens when nerves carrying a signal (say from the eyes) are connected to the wrong part of the brain (say the hearing centre). Then the brain interprets these signals as legitemate signals, so the persom has mixed senses.

Anne.Uumellmahaye: I know a girl who sees numbers in color. I used to quiz her to make sure she wasn't making it up. She says that until she was in about 4th grade or so, she thought that's just how numbers were.

There was a nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, who had the same thing. He made it all of the way to university without realising his condition.

Spider Dijon
I've got music (well, sound in general) and colors. I'm a linguist by day (read: foreign language major) and a bass guitarist on Fridays.

The music looks awesome, but the best stuff is in other languages.

When Farkers look at Drew, they instantly taste of Pilsner or something.

Fluff Girl: libbynomore2: Funny headline,

Seeing Hillary reminds me of really nasty looking scrambled eggs. Barak on the other hand reminds me of that drink that looks exactly like a chocolate shake, tastey and sweet but when you drink it, it turns out to be one of those nasty tasting weightloss shakes.

Tastes bad and does nothing to make things better

So how does Grandpa McCain's penis taste?

A cross between Vietamese prostitute and Fark TV.

George Bush gives me a taste similar to the crusty potato bit on top of a cottage pie.

I can't help but wonder if Bush would taste like that if the guy had different political leanings...

greyfox
I've got music (well, sound in general) and colors. I'm a linguist by day (read: foreign language major) and a bass guitarist on Fridays.

The music looks awesome, but the best stuff is in other languages.

If this is true, then I urge you to take up painting as well.

/you lucky ba$tard

awesome! I have Synaesthesia too, but the more typical kind, which is the combination of hearing and seeing. All words have colors too me.. I didn't know this weird mental thing actually had a name until recently, so I get really excited when I hear about someone else who has it.

███ ███
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████ so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.

semiotix

hehe.. I don't think that would actually have meaning to anyone with Synaesthesia though; there's not a 1-1 correspondance between words and colors. (You can go from word -> color but not from color -> word)

I got to experience Synaestesia once when I ate a 1/4oz of shrooms back in high school. The trip lasted all of maybe 6 hours but the odd color sound thing lasted about 2 days. It was a trip but I don't think I would want to spend my whole life like that, it would get confusing having known the world differently before.

If anyone wants to learn more, there's a good book out there called "The Man who Tasted Shapes".

Synaesthesia is not just sense overlap, it also has a strong psychological element.

A good way of describing some of what is involved is how even colorblind people can see colors in a color wheel illusion. A color wheel is a black and white pattern that, when spun, creates the illusion of color directly in the brain. The cones in the eyes play no part in the perception of color in this case.

Smells and tastes play a major part in synaesthesia, because odors, especially, are for some reason one of our longest retained memories. People can often remember unique smells they have not smelled for 50 or more years.

Importantly synaesthesia can also work with abstracts. One classic perception is "time as an elephant", in which time is perceived as a physical mass which gets smaller as time passes. That is, if you are meeting someone tomorrow, you see time as a (24 hour) "elephant" at first, but as you get closer to the meeting, the elephant decreases in size until it is just the size of a mouse or smaller, just minutes before you meet.

Some people perceive music as mathematical equations, language or emotions. The comedian Steve Martin had a routine about how "happy" a banjo sounds, even while singing morbid lyrics.

Even anthropomorphism may be a form of synaesthesia, assigning human characteristics to animals or even inanimate objects.

I have always wondered whether I had synaesthesia or an over-active imagination. Numbers have personality (29 is a right bastard), and foods have frequency like a sin wave (tapioca pudding is high frequency while milk has a low frequency). I can usually just add the functions to get foods to taste good together in cooking.

my mom always talks about seeing number as different colors, like 6 is a kind of turquoise and i think 8 is a reddish hue. she's an accountant, so i guess her world is pretty colorful. whenever i try to work with numbers i just get stabby.

My psych prof in college, who was literally a brain surgeon, said that this was a largely made up condition and that really all they were doing was associating memories with flavors/sounds/colors. It mostly through past associations and perceptions of your interactions that decide which flavor/sound/color you experience.

Spider Dijon
If this is true, then I urge you to take up painting as well.

/you lucky ba$tard

I took art classes in high school and found out I'm terrible at anything better than stick figures. Turns out I have near perfect pitch, though. I'd bet your friend has a similar issue.

Nanan: I got to experience Synaestesia once when I ate a 1/4oz of shrooms back in high school. The trip lasted all of maybe 6 hours but the odd color sound thing lasted about 2 days. It was a trip but I don't think I would want to spend my whole life like that, it would get confusing having known the world differently before.

What would be even cooler (or possibly the worst experience of their life) is if someone with synesthesia tripped on acid. I can't imagine how intense that would be.

Passive Aggressive Larry:
What would be even cooler (or possibly the worst experience of their life) is if someone with synesthesia tripped on acid. I can't imagine how intense that would be.

That sounds like one of the most disturbing experiences ever.. one of the many reasons I will never try psychedelics.

Jericho9mm
Your prof is wrong/working with outdated info.

greyfox
I took art classes in high school and found out I'm terrible at anything better than stick figures. Turns out I have near perfect pitch, though. I'd bet your friend has a similar issue.

My friend, like you, is not any kind of visual artist, in his case, he also has no distinctive visual taste.
Like me, he's got excellent relative pitch, if not perfect pitch.

Wish I could stick a flash drive in his ear before he plays a piece so that I can yank it out when he's done + upload it to Photoshop for some artsy fun.

/if only

A'Tuin: I have always wondered whether I had synaesthesia or an over-active imagination. Numbers have personality (29 is a right bastard), and foods have frequency like a sin wave (tapioca pudding is high frequency while milk has a low frequency). I can usually just add the functions to get foods to taste good together in cooking.

But have you kicked your cooking into the Fourier domain and upward continued it?

I had a dream in which I was being chased by weird aliens, and they couldn't understand that I had escaped by shifting from megahertz to gigahertz.

Anne.Uumellmahaye: I know a girl who sees numbers in color. I used to quiz her to make sure she wasn't making it up. She says that until she was in about 4th grade or so, she thought that's just how numbers were.

Wow, same here. An old girlfriend. Strangely enough "43" was always a puffy kind of blue, and "6" was orange with brownish-yellow hairs.

Smells fishy....

sweetmelissa31: awesome! I have Synaesthesia too, but the more typical kind, which is the combination of hearing and seeing. All words have colors too me.. I didn't know this weird mental thing actually had a name until recently, so I get really excited when I hear about someone else who has it.

All joking aside, I'm extremely myopic (and mildly colorblind), but my sense of smell and hearing are very acute. What's interesting is even with glasses on (which makes my vision mostly 20/20) I tend percieve things more in terms smell and sound than vision. It gets very interesting when I can tell what someone's last meal was, pick up a conversation halfway across a crowded bar, etc.

I guess the point of what I'm saying is that about half of my memory is not visual at all, and a large minority of it is pure smell/taste or acoustic.

/Maybe I'm a werewolf
//I do prefer my red meat to be rare.

whammer: Synaesthesia is not just sense overlap, it also has a strong psychological element.

A good way of describing some of what is involved is how even colorblind people can see colors in a color wheel illusion. A color wheel is a black and white pattern that, when spun, creates the illusion of color directly in the brain. The cones in the eyes play no part in the perception of color in this case.

As a red-green colorblind person, I'm fairly sure that a COMPLETE LACK of color vision is excruciatingly uncommon. Its mostly red-green, with some other color pair issues with much less regularity.

So when you say "colorblind people," and go on to insinuate that black and white is all we see, it shows that you don't have a firm grasp of whatever bullshiat you're talking about. Perhaps you do, come to think of it; but it still doesn't matter because the words coming from your mind equate only to bullshiat. Colorblind bullshiat with wings that can tapdance is still bullshiat.

If I'm wrong, I don't give a fark, so don't bother correcting me. fark off and die, thanks for playing, buh bye.

Sometimes when I listen to music, especially good live music, I can close my eyes and just visualize spontaneously. Normally if I try to visualize things it's a laborious process. With music it comes unbidden.

Not the same as this guy's synesthesia, but it's still pretty cool. I was at a show on Friday, colors were swirling behind my eyelids. At another show I visualized that i was flying through a canyon.

\no I don't do drugs

I have the "words with colors" thing! I never thought it was anything but my overactive imagination. Weird...

Jericho9mm
My psych prof in college, who was literally a brain surgeon, said that this was a largely made up condition and that really all they were doing was associating memories with flavors/sounds/colors. It mostly through past associations and perceptions of your interactions that decide which flavor/sound/color you experience.

Either this guy is the real deal, or he rewired his brain from childhood so he's almost the real deal anyway.

whammer: Even anthropomorphism may be a form of synaesthesia, assigning human characteristics to animals or even inanimate objects.

Actually, that makes sense in a way. I know several people who have an extreme case of humanising animals. At the same time most people posess this condition, and can vary its extent (e.g. the situational anthropomorphism of Wilson in that Tom Hanks castaway movie). Perhaps it is an intended synesthesia.

It's definitely food for thought.