Anecdotal Evidence Theater, Essay Version

[corivax]

There have been three interesting public posts on my friends list about synaesthesia of late. ( 1, 2, 3), plus two interesting friends-locked ones. Far be it from me to do anything other than mindlessly follow the cool kids!

I think "synaesthesia" as the official medical definition goes is reasonably uncommon, but most people I've talked to have

Comments

[pomma_penses]

I have a very boring clinical sort of synaethesia which I keep meaning to email a synsethesia association about, 'cuz I've never heard of it happening to anyone else.

I hear skin irritation (such as the beginning stages of athelete's foot) as a rapid drumming in my right ear. A faster drumming sound correlates to worse irritation.

I remember having this even when I was a very small child, although the drumming sound may have been in both ears, then.

[ayalanya]

this is why i should go back to tagging entries. i doubt i put the posts about synaesthesia in my memories.

for me everything has taste. not necessarily a 'real' taste, but a sort of back-of-the-tongue sensation-taste that may or may not corrospond with something that can be tasted with taste buds. ...or, possibly it does, since i've tasted a good many things that were familiar the first time i tried them.

other senses have additional cross-senses. sound has everything but smell - taste, sight (color and shapes), sensation. it physically hurts when i hear something badly off-key (but thankfully i like pain, so in some contexts that can be pleasant), and i react as though getting beaten when i hear something too loud.

taste can be color, but frequently taste is just taste. smell usually is color. color is taste-sight and sometimes sensation. sensation is frequently color, too, come to think of it. luckily i didn't inherit my mother's colorblindness; i'd go crazy.

[insomniac_tales]

I remember reading about this a long time ago, when it was a rather unknown disorder. At least general public-wise. I've never really been sure if I actually have it

[insomniac_tales]

This is 2tiffanyway btw. I wasn't logged in to the writing journal when I saw this.

[corivax]

Eh, I'd been meaning to getting around to adding your regular journal anyway. :)

[trar]

weird. interesting. weiresting. inteird. hmm. :)

I have always smelled/tasted colors, but I don't think it needs a vague and multisyllabic term. I just figure this is all pretty natural since our thalamus isn't exactly operated by AT&T. Plus, while we're fond of naming all the little nerves and cells and studying action potentials, we really, really don't know what the fuck is going on in there. *pokes*

[caladri]

You actually feel things being out of place, don't you? Your body language really betrays that. Likewise, I suspect mine betrays that it's a relative-position/spatial thing for me. I've noticed recently that the way I move my hands around sometimes seems to relate to the way I'm manipulating stuff in my head. For example, last night when I was trying to figure out how many days to Thursday (or was that the night before - whatever), I was seeing this bouncing ball (like karaoke ones) going between this linear set of blocks representing days, searching for the one in question, and then counting the number of day-length lines between the points where the ball had dropped, and I realized that my hands were manipulating those lines in space in front of me.

touch

[corivax]

You might be amused by this, which I only now thought of as relevant: silenceleigh's description of math as a tangible process.

Re: touch

[caladri]

That's fairly interesting! My early exposure to maths and some slightly-higher maths meant that I came up with a lot of similar ways for working with things. Nearly everything is a matter of manipulating triangles in my head, and I do most large-number maths using approximations and ratios and a very mind's-eye-visual feel for getting things to line up right. It's like I have a broken maths compiler, or maybe just a weird instruction set, and I can only work with 16-bit immediates, but I can shift around and get the right results with some odd transformations :)