Synesthesia (psychology/neuroscience) - Do you perceive any sign of this?

[We Are The Witches]

There's already a thread on this, but it's almost a decade old and OP is a bit lacking.

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For those who don't know, briefly summarizing, synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway, i.e: a phenomenon that causes sensory crossovers, such as tasting colors, associating numbers/letters to colors, feeling sounds, etc.

Basic links if you want to check:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_synesthesia_research

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I want to know if any of you experience this, and also if anyone's case is similar to mine.

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So for the longest time I could sort of "feel" the tiles I stepped on (or floor in general), their unique patterns and colors would make it have a different sensation on my feet, but this is regardless of any shoes I wear, so (I guess) it's obviously solely dependent on my brain and expectations I have on what I'm stepping on.

Like if I step on a tile that is white, but also has a red pattern on it (doesn't matter what colors are, only that are different, maybe even different texture), the part of my foot that is on the white feels different than the one on the red, and the same would happen if I stepped completely with my left/right foot on the red tile while the other on the white, it "feels" different (shoes don't matter).

If you ask me how, I guess that this sensation would be comparable to like a mix of temperature or taste, but not quite, so "white" would generally feel "lighter" or "colder", but not necessarily. Maybe more accurately it would be like thermal conductivity, like if you touch metal and cork both at the same temperature, but you'd know which is which, or something like that.

Would also happen with the shadows of people I pass by, or even the imaginary lines that would shoot from the vertex of any geometrical pattern on the floor, like a square manhole cover/unique tile (they could also "bounce", like if a line hit the end of the pavement it would "ricochet" accordingly).

So as a kid, I would jump over those "lines" for fun, or make the sensation in both feet symmetrical, like if I stepped on 1 red tile and 1 grey tile with my right foot, then I'd try to balance it out for the left, by stepping on 1 red & 1 grey as well.
This has no impact in my current life, as I can choose to ignore it if I want.

 

[Sailor Kim Jong Moon]

I have personification synesthesia. All my numbers and letters have colors and personalities assigned to them. It’s very autistic and I’ve been able to ignore it the older I’ve gotten.

(Sometimes called Ordinal-Linguistic Personification or OLP)

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

I can't recall his name but a British Composer bourn around 1920 was a child and thought until his late teens that when they turn down the lights in a theatre it was so you could see the colours better as part of the show and just assumed everyone else was seeing them as well, he wrote his music in various coloured pencil an pen as a result.

As for a personal account - I had to have surgery on my nose to reconstruct it after an injury and for about a day I could smell colours an sensation the sensation of holding some rough cheap paper smelled like static to me, I walked into a Green corridor and it smelled like freshly cut grass but it felt like rough dogs fur, if I ran my hand along the wall, thinking about it the weirdest sensation was lemon it smelled of nothing but felt like biting ice crystals.

I don't know if it was the drugs I was on and coming around from surgery but that was a wacky 24 hours, the closest I have ever had to that since was tasting mirical fruit where flavour profiles are inverted i.e. sweet is sour and sour is sweet, etc and another time involving the hospital where I was seeing colours after I wanged my head on a parking bollard during a medical indecent, but it was driven by the voices so if someone talked softly an sweetly it was pastel coloured but if someone was shouting it was harsh deep an dark.

 

[Otterly]

I have concept-to-colour linking, and I very often confuse smell sounds and colour when speaking. Some touch perceptions have a taste.
I’m not sure if that’s full synathesia or not. Everything has a colour and a kind of physical shape property tIt’s almost impossible to describe properly,
@Phalanges Mycologist that sounds fun and trippy as fuck. The description of the corridor as fuzzy and with a smell is something I recognise though. I do wonder if it’s some kind of weird neural mix up, because it becomes very intense before I get migraines, it’s one of the prodrome symptoms I have before i get a really bad one. I’ll touch something and feel like lemon sherbet, that really bity cold sour sort of perception, and know I’m in for a bad day at some point.
Brains are very peculiar. I suspect a lot of people have some degree of this and have just never really thought about it.

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

@Phalanges Mycologist that sounds fun and trippy as fuck. The description of the corridor as fuzzy and with a smell is something I recognise though. I do wonder if it’s some kind of weird neural mix up, because it becomes very intense before I get migraines, it’s one of the prodrome symptoms I have before i get a really bad one. I’ll touch something and feel like lemon sherbet, that really bity cold sour sort of perception, and know I’m in for a bad day at some point.
Brains are very peculiar. I suspect a lot of people have some degree of this and have just never really thought about it.

You see I wonder if part of that is your brain having access to other paths when your trying to understand something and exploring the new options, one of the things I do as a Smith is talk about heat as colour, when we are tempering steels an irons we "Draw the colour out" as your watching a heat formed oxide layer and some smiths have talked about the running colour off the edge an some even mention the smell (but both are vanishingly few) - now in my mind various colours of straw or blue's are hard wired in a different way outside of it being a nice colour and I wonder what my brain would make of them if it was in a similar situation again.

But I will back up the feel of materials, you can feel materials and know what it feels like and understand where a break will form it's normally something that takes ages to understand but I can feel a kink or a cold shut but it's not something strange it's more skill and experience based and takes effort but you can if you know how it feels point out but not explain.

A good example is take a paper clip an straighten it out, take a long straight bit and when pin it between your thumb an fore finger of both hands and wiggle it up an down and you can see the fracture of the chrysal structure colour deform, now do it till it breaks, then take the other half and bend it a few times along it's lenght and then lightly run your fingers along it and you can feel the stress within the metal.

I know where a bad weld is, I know where a cold shut or inclusion is, I can't describe it but but I can god damn feel it, and 9/10 I am right, under xray and vibro / magentic testing, I can't explain it secentifically but it is a natural function and it's not something you can do on mass it's dependant on several human factors.

 

[Otterly]

heat as colour,

Similar in chemistry - you have to be very careful with a flame to get some things exactly right.
What you describe is interesting - I will bet that people who do ‘stuff that requires hand and mind’ experience this a lot. When you’re skilled at something you’re thin slicing a huge amount of data from your senses and most of it is pretty much unconscious. you feel things becasue you can’t process logically, but you can process it as a feeling.

 

[Doctor Love]

I know where a bad weld is, I know where a cold shut or inclusion is, I can't describe it but but I can god damn feel it, and 9/10 I am right, under xray and vibro / magentic testing, I can't explain it secentifically but it is a natural function and it's not something you can do on mass it's dependant on several human factors.

without being too offensive, did you have a stroke, or a history of extremely painful headaches like cluster headaches?

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

Similar in chemistry - you have to be very careful with a flame to get some things exactly right.
What you describe is interesting - I will bet that people who do ‘stuff that requires hand and mind’ experience this a lot. When you’re skilled at something you’re thin slicing a huge amount of data from your senses and most of it is pretty much unconscious. you feel things becasue you can’t process logically, but you can process it as a feeling.

Exactly, a lot of my job is feeling and action I embark on a mission to learn or understand something, just because I am doing it does t make it safe, anyone within the area should be as safe as they need

 

[Anonitolia]

i've got misophonia and it generally doesn't affect my life too much (outside of university lectures), but i've got family that can barely function because they feel very severe emotions from extremely commonplace sounds that you cannot live without hearing. Chewing, breathing, gulping, yawning- all of this stuff sets them off to the point that they are near-constantly wearing construction headphones and sometimes still get triggered with them on. It makes being around them for long periods of time absolutely hellish and I wouldn't wish this kind of shit on anyone. I know how it feels and it's so insanely hard to resist; you have to actively train yourself to ignore the emotions that crop up and it never gets easier.

I doubt this kind of severe reaction is a frequent sight anywhere-- thank GOD-- but when it's bad, it's bad. No doubt would have you sent to an asylum if it was a century or so ago.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I don’t have actual synesthesia in the sense of experiencing the sense but I think there’s a similar phenomenon, which I have, of “knowing” what the equivalent sense is.

Like a color being crunchy, or a sound being heavy, or being able to easily feel what an instrumental song would look like.

I think itd be interesting to compare to the NPC/cow rotating thing.

 

[Billy Bob Dick]

I hear notes and chords as specific colors. Synesthesia in music is fairly common though, and can be learned.

 

[Lowlife Adventures]

No offense, but I'm skeptical of most claims of synesthesia. I think a lot of it is normal human experience that gets misconstrued as special because it's very very difficult to express specific and minute sensory experiences through language (we all know how imprecise language can be). We can only ever be sure about our own "qualia" and not the qualia of others.

Two people might experience the same thing but react to it differently. Person A might think it's a very unusual experience and person B might think it's ordinary. Person A tells B about it, but B doesn't realize that A is talking about the same experience. Since A made a big deal about it, B starts thinking A must have some extrasensory superpowers and starts hyping it up around other people. It doesn't even occur to B that he experienced the same thing because there's no way someone would be amazed by something so ordinary.

 

[Sailor Kim Jong Moon]

No offense, but I'm skeptical of most claims of synesthesia. I think a lot of it is normal human experience that gets misconstrued as special because it's very very difficult to express specific and minute sensory experiences through language (we all know how imprecise language can be). We can only ever be sure about our own "qualia" and not the qualia of others.

Two people might experience the same thing but react to it differently. Person A might think it's a very unusual experience and person B might think it's ordinary. Person A tells B about it, but B doesn't realize that A is talking about the same experience. Since A made a big deal about it, B starts thinking A must have some extrasensory superpowers and starts hyping it up around other people. It doesn't even occur to B that he experienced the same thing because there's no way someone would be amazed by something so ordinary.

I kind of feel that way about visual snow syndrome. I’ve had VSS since I was born probably and it’s really no big deal. Yet some people make it their entire identity and cry about it like it’s cancer. A part of me wonders if it’s normal vision that people pay more attention to and then obsess over.

It’s a bizarre thing to demand funding for. It’s a bizarre thing to catastrophize.

 

[TheArtilleryman]

Looking at bright yellow lights sometimes makes me sneeze.