Synesthesia and related

I've mentioned my synesthesia here, but never really gotten into what it is or how it affects me.

Back in the summer of 2001, I was working as an office temp for a medical office over the summer, and often ran out of things to do by 2 p.m. but had to stick around until 5 to check in patients and answer phones. As a result, I was reading the copies of "Time" that were in the waiting room for the patients, and I ran across this article. And I kind of freaked.

Synesthesia is when your senses are, for lack of a better term, cross-wired. For example, I can hear tastes and taste sounds. Because I also see sounds as colors and shapes, this means I often translate tastes into color and shape as well. For example, one time while explaining this to my friends, I explained that watermelon-flavored Blow Pops taste like Irish music (specifically, a reel —and there must be a fiddle, because they have a very fiddley sound). This is now, on a side-note, the "catch-phrase" they all associate with me. Anyway, they also taste very much like burnt siena, not because that's the actual flavor, but because that is what fiddley Irish reels tend to taste like. Note I said taste and not look — that's 'cause I'm all screwy. And yes, that's in addition to tasting like watermelon candy.

I do also have grapheme-color synesthesia, which is the most common form; most (but not all) people with other forms also have this. Which means that, for example, the title of this blog is red ("siya"), orange ("that") and green ("girl"). These are not colors I associate with those words — those are the colors that the words are. They've always been that color, they always will be that color, and I didn't choose them. That's just what they look like to me.

Not everyone experiences this the same way, and we can get very frustrated when confronted with someone else's synesthesia (not its existence, but their specific experiences). For example, I once had to leave a classroom when the professor was sharing a Rimbaud poem, because the colors he gave letters in the poem were so completely wrong it upset me. Sean Day (in the "Time" article) sees harmonica music as blue-green; for me, it is a very sharp reddish-purple with yellowy-orange highlights.

One of the reasons I've always had this intense curiosity to try LSD — not that I am brave enough to break the law or stupid enough to try it without someone around who could get me through a bad trip intact — is because it is supposed to cause synesthesia-like experiences for people without the ability, and I want to see what would happen if someone who already had synesthesia used it.

Anyway, I kind of freaked because I had never heard of this before, but I did know that most people did not taste music or mix up 2 and 6 because they are EXACTLY the same shade of blue, and finding out that not only was I not the only person who did this, but there was actually a name for it and scientific studies about it, was completely overwhelming to me. But it was really cool to find out that I was not, after all, completely insane. Always a plus, yes?

As I did a little more research, I found some other, related issues issues that I have are connected to synesthesia. Like my inability to tell my left from my right (I can "set" myself for the day with the "L" hand trick, but all bets are off once I've slept or if I haven't needed it for the day), a very good memory (I don't have a great visual memory, so it's not technically photographic, but I remember details of everything I've ever read* or heard and I have a very good spatial memory) and trouble with mathematics — if a formula is right in front of me, I can do it, but give me an application for it, and I can't begin to figure out what information is needed or how to put it together. Word problems destroyed my math grades from third grade on and killed my dreams of a physics degree.

What's interesting to me is that my sister, my grandmother, my aunt, and several of my cousins also have the left-right confusion, and most of them have dyslexia except one cousin who also has synesthesia (I found out after I found a name for it) — and I've heard that the two are related. Kind of weird.

I was mostly thinking about this today as I read another blogger's description of faceblindness and realized I'd never really talked about this. I think it's really fascinating how different all of our perceptions of the world are.

*The "Time" article? I found it again because I remember reading it in the beginning of August in 2001, I remembered that it was from that year and the month was red, so it must have been April or May, that it was in "Time" and that the story was about a little boy named Sean and it talked about how he saw music. I have not read that article since August 2001, nor did I have a copy saved. I just did a Google search for the key points I remembered in order to find it. I don't remember the other stories in that issue because I think I just read that one and then went on an "OMG THIS IS IT, GOOGLE" spree, but I do remember that Timothy McVeigh's execution delay was the cover story, because that's why I was reading that particular issue. This is how my memory works, and it's not as awesome as you'd think.

Oh, and the left-right thing? Sucks, by the way. I can't tell east and west apart, either.