Hello! I have synesthesia. Any other synesthetes in attendance? I enjoy OLP, lexical gustatory, mirror touch, grapheme-color, number form, and others--some more vividly than others but all with a sense of fun. My synesthesia comes into play in my descriptive writing almost constantly, confusing many. Does it affect your writing at all? In what ways? Would love to trade synnie stories! Also love that synesthesia is a literary term. How's that for exciting?
yay! I'm not the only one! That's always nice. Mine's a bit strange, I smell light (colour to some degree but only if it's very intense), and I feel sound but taste voices for some reason (which makes listening to audiobooks very interesting).
The light-olfactory is so cool! I've never heard of it; have you met anyone else with a similar reaction? I think my most vivid reactions are my ordinal linguistic personification (OLP makes dealing with numbers a right royal pain in the posterior) and my mirror touch. I start freaking out if I can't equalize physical sensation, especially pain--which has a weird cottony taste and is glittery gold green, for the record. If I stub my left toe I have to stomp on my right foot to reestablish symmetry and fill up my other limb with color. (/facepalm)
Wow that sounds so interesting No, I haven't met anyone else with my particular crosses, except for the voice-tasting thing, once, and that was ages ago. That's the annoying part about a condition that affects a minority of the population, I don't meet many other people with synesthesia. My crosses do come in handy with my writing. I once described the sunlight in a sci-fi short story as "acrid" because when I was picturing the scene, that's what the light quality smelled like (I'd never thought anything could be worse than flickering fluorescent lights but, guh, the sunlight on that imaginary planet was just awful). And I find it interesting that using flavours to describe voices is something that non-synesthetes can grasp rather well
I have extreme OLP; letters, numbers, etc, have complete back-stories, personalities, physical appearances, and 'feelings'. Friday feels (not physically) better than Saturday. The personalities change with different fonts, languages, and capitalization. Q is only a good letter when it looks like this: Q. If it's lowercase, it's not as childish. Perro is completely different than Dog. I also have spatial sequence synesthesia; 200 is closer than 100, etc. I hold it responsible for my wonderful memory, as Wikipedia says those with SSS remember more. It's nice to know I'm not alone, though! And tasting voices sounds awesome. Have you found one that tastes like chocolate?
My first boyfriend, actually, haha. My current boyfriend's voice tastes like a blueberry danish and I could listen to Neil Gaiman talk in that caramel almond mocha of his forever Carl Sagan's voice is really nice too: bearclaw pastry with cream cheese. (I have a sweet tooth, can you tell? hehe).
