When You Taste Words and Visualizes Sound

3 months ago

I would always joke with a sentence which goes does "what I say is audible to the deaf and what I see is visible to the blind" Although it sounds ridiculous and it has been a joke amongst friends whenever they want to make clear that they had emphasized on something a lot for no one to be left out but what would be your thoughts if I tell you a person could hear colors and see sounds?

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You might have heard singer Billie Eilish talk about songs, saying she wants to create songs that sound the way that velvet feels. People who put all their senses into their art and craft usually merge sight and taste together and this sensory overlap is real for them. But how does this overlap affect their experience? This is a neurological condition that affects about 4% of the world's population and in this post, I will be exploring this topic.

When we talk about mixing of senses, we look at Synesthesia which refers to a secondary sensation that accompanies a sensory reaction where one sense react with another sense. Someone like Adam Neely would often mention a letter and associate it with a color for instance, he mentioned that when he talks about letter A, he has a strongly colored concept of the letter in a condition known as Grapheme color synesthesia.

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People with Grapheme color synesthesia would associate numbers or alphabets with colors but when synesthesia is mentioned, there are more than one form of synesthesia with at least over 73 forms of synesthesia. People with synesthesia do not do it willingly because the sensory connections aren't voluntary, they are automatic where when one sense is activated, the other sense follow suit. People with this conditions are not disabled because there is actually nothing wrong with them. You will realize that in my entire writing, i didn't use the word "suffer from" because they are not disabled.

People can have different type of synesthesia such as one with James Wannerton where his hearing is lined with taste in a what is known as Lexical-gustatory or word taste where a person can taste a word around him. In this case the person can have different taste and texture attached to sounds they hear. This tastes are mouth-filling for some people such as a case of experiencing custard taste in the mouth when a dog barks, or the taste of iron when you hear words like car.

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Another form of synesthesia is has to do with sound linking with color. Melissa McCracken visualizes tones on canvas, she has color grapheme, spacial sequence, and Chromesthesia. With spacial sequence, numbers and dates are associated with physical space, and chromesthesia which has to do with sound to color linking. To McCracken, different music have different color such as Jazz having blue and white color and so on.

According to an article written by professor Ward in the article for psychologist, everyone engages in perception across two senses such as watching a movie and believing that the words in the movie is coming out from the mouth of the person talking whereas it is coming from the headphone or speaker. This is a case of acquire synesthesia which literally would mean that we who do not have synesthesia just have it unused.