Eat Your Words

Several years ago I learned about a disorder or more appropriately a phenomena whereby two or more senses are crossed. Some see colors when listening to music, others associate tastes with words, while others feel a touch on their own body when seeing another person being touched. Collectively, these experiences are called synesthesia.

The most common forms of synesthesia involve associations of words, letters, or numbers with colors. Some estimates say that as many as 1 in 200 people may have word-color synesthesia. By contrast, there have only been five documented cases in the past century of "word-gustatory synesthesia," where hearing or seeing a word evokes an involuntary taste association.

Recently a new form, tactile-emotion synaesthesia, was discovered in which a person experiences a specific emotion whenever they touch a particular texture.

From Scienceblogs.com

In AW, a 22-year-old female, the most vivid emotions are evoked by denim, which causes in her strong feelings of depression and disgust, and silk, which produces feelings of happiness and contentment. Other textures evoked a wide variety of emotions and feelings: when she touched corduroy, AW felt confused; leather aroused feelings of receiving criticism; multicoloured toothpaste made her feel anxious; wax made her feel embarrassed; tylenol gel caps made her feel jealous; and different grades of sand paper made her feel either guilt, relief, or as if she was telling a white lie.

In HS, a 20-year-old female, the same textures often evoked different feelings. She felt no real emotion when touching denim but was disgusted instead by the texture of fleece and wax; corduroy made her feel disappointed; bok choy made her feel irritated, but smooth metal made her feel sedated and calm. In this subject, the strongest emotion was evoked when she touched soft leather, which made her feel extremely scared - she described the sensation as "making my spine crawl."

This is fascinating stuff and at some level I feel like I'm missing out...oh well.

Here are a few articles on other manifestations of synesthesia:

• New Insight into People Who Taste Words
• Rare but Real: People Who Feel, Taste and Hear Color
• What I See, I Feel: Mirror-Touch Synesthesia

Or click here for part 1 of a BBC program on synesthesia and here for part 2.