Do You Have Synesthesia?

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I was home-schooled. However, I did go through my spelling books really quickly.



Yeah, that's how I really recognized that mine is actually ticker-tape. I can't change it.
Before I knew it was synesthesia, I tried to change the words that I saw, when learning other languages, to go in the other direction, or to have a different alphabet. It never worked. It's totally involuntary. You can't do it.

But, after enough exposure to the other language, when I hear the word it now starts to pop up in its proper alphabet all by itself. So I guess there's a level of adaptability to it....but I can't control which word is in the other alphabet or not....and it doesn't happen with phrases (yet).

I still don't know what made it happen....our brains are so odd....

Yes. Always the word, like a millisecond before, though. Close enough to feel simultaneous. Also, conversations that are abstract have background color, though I haven't figured out what determines the color.

Yes, colors with musical keys.

Two women at an aspie meeting I attended also had some form, numbers etc.

My daughter is the strongest synaesthete I've ever come across. She has cross-overs in all her senses but is exceptionally visual. She sees people, pain, numbers, music, smells, tastes, touch.... all in colour. Her world must be stunningly vivid.
She loves language and is doing A-level literature. She also has a natural gift for learning languages but I don't think she sees it written, I think she hears it in colours like she does music, most of her synaesthesia is connected with vision. She learns languages much faster than her peers; when she started Y8 they accidentally moved her from French to Spanish lessons and she didn't say anything - 6 weeks in she came top in a test and I got a postcard from school telling me how well my daughter, who I still thought was studying French, was doing in her second year of Spanish!

She has severe dyslexia to the point where she still can't write by hand in a way others can read or make sense of so I suspect she doesn't use the written word in her head.

We took part in some research last year and I came out as a very low, associative synaesthete and she came out the highest the researcher had ever seen.

Reading this, everything is so positive, and I know my daughter has an absolutely phenomenal experience of the world that I can never share, and probably will never truly understand - I am very jealous sometimes, my own low level synaesthesia is something i love and wish I had more to play with.

However, my daughter also has some drawbacks, one of which means she lives with severe pain and probably has done for all her life.
She has Pain Amplification Syndrome which is where the sensory pathways don't switch properly and each time she has an emotional or physical trauma the pain increases. According to her consultant the emotional centers and the pain centers are always closely linked and trigger each other to some extent but because she is synaesthetic and her senses trigger responses from other areas so strongly the signals are crossing between the two areas and triggering a dramatic response where in someone else it would be a minor short lived effect.

Interestingly, her synaesthesia also helps her control her pain - last summer I took her to see Ian Jordan in Ayr and he taught her to visualise the opposite colour of her pain. It doesn't take it away but it does reduce it considerably and she can just about live with it without taking excessive amounts of the nasty specialised pain relief and chemical blockers which were interfering with her ability to function.

Another less serious drawback; she sees music in different colours from her music teacher who developed a system of teaching based on her own synaesthesia (without realising this is what she had done) - it's a commercially available system widely used for steel pans and similar tuned instruments and I've seen it used to arrange complex classical pieces for performance at the Albert Hall so it isn't just for kids.
My daughter used to deliberately colour her sheets with her own colours and it used to drive her (very aspie) teacher up the wall until I explained why!

I had actually never heard of this until just now but I think I have it to some degree. I always thought it was somewhat normal or that maybe I was weird and just making it up.

In fifth grade I went to the state wide spelling bee. I felt awful about it though, like I was cheating. When a reporter asked me how I could spell all these different words, I told her the truth, that I can see them in my head once they're said. I thought for sure I was cheating and would get in trouble. I've always been a good speller that way. When someone says a word, it's like it's been typed in my mind.

Certain objects make me feel certain ways, I don't know if that would count. Mostly it's just a ba feeling. Certain trees, houses, furniture, etc would make me think of death. I don't know, I can't explain it. It's annoying going shopping for furniture because everything is based off the feeling I get from it. I feel like objects have personalities almost. Probably not the same thing though.

I do taste certain things too. The worst is plants. I've never actually tasted plants but sometimes certain things give me a taste of plants. I don't know. It's hard to explain, I've never thought about it before. I figured people would think I was crazy. I definitely stopped mentioning it as a child because my parents had a strange response to it. I honestly don't pay much attention to the way things occur to me anymore.

No i don't have Synesthesia.

I don't visualize anything connected to language. Reading, writing and listening to others speaking are all connected to my hearing. I have a very strong inner voice, and when typing or writing I say/hear the words in my mind. Sometimes my tongue also moves a little along with the inner voice. When I listen to others talking I hear an echo of their words in my head, spoken in my own inner voice just a few milliseconds later than their spoken words. Whenever this echo isn't activated - if I'm focused on something else for instance - I can't hear the meaning in what is being said, only the noise. I've always excelled in spelling, though I read very slowly - 3 or 4 times as slow as my boyfriend. This contributed to my failure in getting a university degree, since I couldn't keep up with the reading.

I do have the ability to visualize, though it's not connected to anything verbal at all. It's mostly like murky distant images or 'movies', 'seen' somewhere inside my head. Mostly I think in movement/kinesthetically. I have a really hard time translating between my kinesthetic/spatial/visual thoughts and verbal language. It's like there's a bottleneck in my brain between the two 'modes' of mental functioning. However, I don't think I have synesthesia.

I wanted link to my post on Synesthesia, and I couldn't the first day I posted because I was too new. :) http://www.lunalindsey.com/2012/10/grap ... a-map.html

I made a map of my grapheme-colors and also link to several sites doing research on all types of synesthesia. I recommend following those links and taking the tests. They give you a score. They're especially looking for other sense-combos and for other traits that go along with synesthesia, like unpleasant feelings, migraines, and the connection with autism.

I wish I knew whether the way I think about numbers is synesthesia or just visual thinking. They have shape, density... the shapes change, and the volume and density can change, but the overall numberness of them doesn't. Primes tend to be long, awkward strings, and composites are rectangular, sometimes with more than three dimensions. The powers of two are the weirdest, because they keep flipping from one thing to another--so many possibilities, but also a bit plain and predictable. Numbers like 24 are the most beautiful: Lots of factors, but the factors aren't all the same. 24 is more beautiful than 144. I don't know why. Maybe it's just easier to think about. I don't have images for really big numbers; I couldn't identify a prime just by how it looked, not until I thought about it a bit. But I'll get that awkward feeling about a number that's either prime or has only large prime factors, a short time before I determine intellectually that it actually is prime. The numbers 17 and 19 give me the most feeling of awkwardness; above that, it's less obvious, so less intense, and below that, they're connected to their composites. 2 and 3 aren't awkward at all, even though they're primes. 1 is hardly a number at all; it's more like air, ubiquitous and unobtrusive. Zero keeps flipping into infinity.

I'm pretty sure this is just visual thinking, but it does shade into synesthesia a little.

I have it with feeling and textures mostly but colors also have feelings to them and numbers do too but they change every few years. Right now 8 is solid and 4 is like a house, 3 is creative and 2 is friendship, 1 is strong, 5 is money, 6 is a snake that is sneaky, 7 is happy, 9 is magical

blue is sad, red is passionate, yellow is happy, green is envy and new life, brown is earthy, black is mysterious, white is pure, this is all pretty cliche

other than that i can feel moods in everything pretty much,

I have synesthesia, mostly colored letters and numbers, but I wonder how accurate your poll is. You see, your poll was on the forum in a whole list of things I could have clicked on, and I didn't HAVE to click on it at all. The "synesthesia" jumped out at me because I have synesthesia. I wonder if other people saw it and thought "Cool, synesthesia, I have that too!" and did your poll, and other people who had never even heard of it didn't. But I do think that people with autism are more likely to have synesthesia. I think there's some kind of link, genetic or otherwise.

Yeah, that's known as a self-selection bias. So obviously the poll isn't scientific. But maybe it attracts more people to the topic to share their experiences with synesthesia.

I know what you mean. My ideathesia is pretty random and weak, but became apparent during college math. But i can feel the math into motion. Now that I recognize the experience, my meta physical activity has improved and occurs beyond math sometimes.

Days, weeks, months and numbers, - even letters, if I start thinking about it, have colors.
When I play an instrument or listen to music, I see colors. When I paint, music takes form in my head and sometimes, I feel like I´m emerging from a sea of music, when I stop painting.