I'm a synaesthete and I haven't known it for my whole life. In fairness, much to my shame, I didn't know synaesthesia was a thing, and more than that, a thing a considerable percentage of people on this planet experience on a day to day basis. Existing in a mind-boggling variety of forms, synaesthesia represents the neurological interaction between two or more senses, with stimulation of one sensory centre triggering an involuntary response in another sensory centre. In a nutshell, make a synaesthete listen to a certain sound, and they will see or taste or even smell something else as an immediate result.
This is the point where things get kind of crazy: synaesthesia is a very broad psychological phenomenon, including more than 80 reported types. Only a few of them have been scientifically studied, though, so for most of it, synaesthesia is still a mystery and an example of just how complicated the human mind actually is.
My own knowledge on the topic is quite limited, and don't get me wrong, I'm not taking pride in that. By only briefly reading about it for my psych course and (yeah) going over the Wikipedia page (which is quite comprehensive so if you want to find out more, go there), I became more interested in my own experience with synaesthesia rather than the process itself. Since knowing about synaesthesia, I have looked at my daily sensory experiences in a totally different way: basically, a lot of sh*t goes down and my brain is working frantically to provide more than what my eyes can see and what my ears can hear. It is something I can't help or control and, most of the time, it takes over without my consent (hence why, without joking now, I'd rather not listen to music while I'm out and about). I feel like, no matter how hard I try, I might not be able to offer a good explanation for how synaesthesia works, but to hell with it, I need something decently interesting to write about.
Most of my synaesthesia experiences revolve around colour. Since I was really young (4-5 years of age) I have associated colours to pretty much every concept I operated with. I remember learning the numbers from 1 to 10 by associating them with the two genders I knew about at the time (just to be politically correct), and for so long I kept thinking of '5' as a boy and '7' as a girl. Shortly after, as I learned about the numbers following 10, I started associating different numbers and numbers series to different colours, a practice I used when I learned the alphabet as well. This was more than just one of the quirks of my childhood, since I can perfectly recall the gender and colour of every number and letter. Although I was growing up and developing some proper operational and logical skills, colours have remained an important part of my learning process: all my notes for different school subjects, book chapters, lessons and concepts had their assigned colours. I obviously cannot link my academic success to using coloured markers when taking notes, but one thing I did notice was that my interest in learning decreased as I became lazier and lazier and stopped using my already established colour schemes. For university, I try to use colours for my notes again, and my bullet journal has its own colour system, and frankly, the sight of it makes me feel full of energy and purpose. Things make sense again!
Colours still play a huge role in my mental projections of logical concepts, such as time and space. My timelines for weeks, years and even for my knowledge of human history contain colours, and it's no different for geography, countries and cities. October is orange and it may not be that big of a deal, but February is pink and August is brown, Canada is purple-blue and Berlin is dark green, and the 90s were just very black. And so on and so forth.
One of my personal photographic projects involved taking pictures that would convey what I see when I hear certain songs. This is the picture for My Number, from Foals...
(source: personal archive)
My most intense synaesthesia experience with colours has definitely been music. I'm a huge fan of music and I always make sure that music accompanies me in everything I do: studying, working out, travelling, avoiding small talk. I'm the kind of person who has different playlists for different house chores, particular remixes and acoustic sets that I especially like, and a Record of the Week section on my personal blog. Music is a pretty big thing for me, and my synaesthesia has, if anything, deepened the relationship that I have with music. Although it doesn't happen with every single song or artist, listening to most music makes me see things. And before it gets any weirder, certain sounds and musical progressions make me visualise not just particular colours, but entire visual sequences involving these colours and a certain aesthetic for the vibe of the song in cause. It is almost like a song can sound like an image for me, and as I am listening to the song, I can see the image very clearly, easily reproduce its structure without even attempting to. A song can sound blue to me, or a song can sound like beach at sunset and a couple is taking a walk down the shore but there is a party with lots of people not further away. And this is probably the only valid way I can put this out there.
Given that most music released these days is usually coming along with visual material that embraces and promotes it, synaesthesia can be mistaken for associating a song with its music video or artwork. I feel like the core difference between simple recollection and synaesthesia is that, if you are a synaesthete, a song would make you feel like you are looking at the image instead of just visualising it. In other words, synaesthesia is when you hear something and it makes you feel like you are looking at something else right then and there - you have the sound, the image and the feeling of both happening at the same time. Ugh, this reads like pure gibberish to me but there is no other way I can say it. As somebody who's felt like this since, well, forever, it is hard for me to imagine that somebody might not feel like this about music in the first place.
... and this is what I see when I listen to Kids, by MGMT.
(source: personal archive)
Synaesthesia might sound like a very cool, quite trippy experience that spices up my uninteresting existence but as somebody from the inside, I disagree. For me personally, synaesthesia can become exhausting, tedious and it can interfere with whatever I am doing at the moment when it's triggered. Listening to music becomes a very demanding activity, since it involves more than just hearing the sounds and enjoying them for what they are. Both my auditory and my visual sense are engaged, and I soon become tired from, honestly, thinking too much about the sounds and the images at the same time. I've recently learned, after so many years of listening to music, that I actually don't find music relaxing at all. In addition to this, seeing the same images over and over again as I am listening to their respective songs gets very boring after some time; I end up not being intelectually or emotionally challenged by the music anymore. Last but not least, colours and visual experiences emerging from music may distract me from performing the simplest activities, hence why my concentration is very poor and I become a danger to myself if I walk down the street, with my headphones on. Not so nice, eh?
I found that my synaesthesia is more than just colours and visual experiences. For example, I am one of those triggered over heels by ASMR stuff (or more scientifically accurate, the autonomous sensory meridian response). Certain sounds or the mental picture of certain materials give me a tingling, calming sensation that I cannot explain or control. Although I hardly ever look up ASMR playlists on YouTube, I do have my fair share of meditation apps containing rainfall, thunderstorm and whale sounds that seem to make me feel the happiest and most at ease.
And because by this point, I am very tempted to make you think that I am totally crazy, I can also use my senses in my dreams. Actual night dreams, in which I can taste or smell just like in real life. It hasn't happened to me as often as other bits of synaesthesia from my life, and I also found that they happen alongside the very few lucid dreams I've had, but I can't help but associate this phenomenon with the actual interaction that occurs between my senses. I tasted chocolate in one of my dreams, and I also smelled vomit (perfect nightmare scenario for me). Usually these dreams freak me out, and I've never spent enough time in a dream to remember anything else apart from the fact that I could taste or smell. Go deal with that.
I feel like I need to insist that synaesthesia is not an abnormality, and it is actually more frequent that one can believe. Coming to terms with the fact that I experience this thing which has a scientific name and is determined by certain workings of my brain was quite scary, and it essentially meant that I had to accept that I am different. Ultimately, I decided to think of it as a good kind of different: it allows me to live life to a whole new level and to be creative with the images, sounds and feelings that mean the most to me. It is not always easy and cute, but it has its perks. It is me.
I will conclude with a few useful links about synaesthesia, and I would also like to reiterate that nothing is more genuine and beautiful than being yourself and assuming your experiences and adventures through life as your own. And before I get any more pathetic, HAPPY BEDIJ.
Photo source: personal archive.
Photo edit: InstaSize.