My Synesthesias

[dsgood]

I was eighteen when I first realized I had synesthesia. (I didn't know the name for it, back then.) I was listening to a jazz record, and was asked if I could see music. I thought about it a moment, and realized that I could.

(There were a lot of things I didn't realize about myself, but that's another story.)

Several years later, someone asked if I saw music when I was high. (This was during the 1960s, when synesthesia was well-known -- but only as a drug effect.) I answered truthfully, "No, only when I'm not high." This weirded him out.

These days, my synesthetic experience of sound is texture rather than color. And it's more kinesthetic and tactile than visual. I'm much more in touch with my body than I used to be, and that's probably the reason for the change.

I've also learned to use kinesthetic/tactile diagrams in my thinking. I believe this started in the 1980s, when I learned to use macros on a CPT word processor.

I also have "ticker tape." When I hear speech, or when I think in words, I see the words written down. Not in front of me, but out of the corners of my eyes. I usually don't pay attention to it.

It's never in the same typeface twice. I was startled when I realized this.

Jump back to when I was around twelve. I saw blind kids walking around, and they were sensing obstacles. I asked one of them. He said that it was as if he felt the obstacles.

I tried it, and after a while I could do it. And it came across as touch.

Some time later, I found out how it works. It's called echolocation. Bats are much better at it than humans, but many humans can do it. Get a clicker toy (they cost 50¢ in the Twin Cities), and try it.

Comments

[nebulosity]

Wow, thanks for sharing your story! That's a very interesting kind of synaesthesia. I've gone through some of the same observation process that you've gone through -- not realize that a kind of synaesthesia is there until you pay attention to how you're perceiving it, and then suddenly you realize there is much more to that experience then just simple touch, vision, sight or smell. I think part of this has to do with the fact that we probably develop the synaesthesia early enough in life that the way of perception is thought to be normal. For example, I thought it was normal to perceive letters and number with colors, so I didn't even consciously realize it for a few years. Often our interaction with others prompts us to analyze our perception of the world, which causes us to notice more about the way we work.

Another similar experience I had was learning more about the complexity of my synaesthesia than I initially thought possible. There is a pattern/reason/logic to the way I perceive colors with graphemes, particularly lexemes. I learned this when I asked my friends to volunteer to have me tell them the color I perceive with their username, where I started to analyze "Why does such-and-such color dominate this word?" "Oh, it's because of a combination of harshness of sound," or "because of a grouping of certain letters," etc. I learned that there is essentially a science to my synaesthesia, and that my brain is actually doing logical computations when perceiving new words.

Anyway, I really enjoyed your post! Welcome to the community. :)

[dsgood]

Welcome.

Thank you.

More in a day or two.

[tine]

The thing about noticing it is that it's normal for you. It's not something you learn, but it's always there. If you don't talk about it and people tell you that not everybody sense things this way, you don't know that it's special. I only realized that other people don't taste colours when I once told somebody that the soup needed more purple.

[dsgood]

Let me try to make this clearer: I did NOT know I had most of my synesthesias. Which is rather different from knowing about them, but not knowing they're unusual.