Can Smells Be Too Loud?

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Right off some of you will know exactly what I'm going to say just from the subject of this thread.

I haven't gone into this technically, haven't discussed it with anyone or found the correct term but do your senses overlap or get mixed up at times?

Example - when something hurts me I hear a sound. Put in a contact lens and it's not clean enough and there's sudden pain - I also see the color red flash behind my eyes and hear a chord in my ears. I thought everyone did until just a year or so ago.

Today for the holiday I have a big ham in the oven that I cooked overnight. Usually I do this with turkey on Thanksgiving, too, and I never sleep well. Just hate the smell of food cooking while I'm trying to sleep and it wakes me up over and over. Not because it smells good, or because I'm hungry but because the smell is TOO LOUD and I can't sleep.

I tried to explain this to my significant other this morning and he just stared blankly at me.

Anyone else know what I'm talking about? I assume it's an Aspie thing.

Sounds like synesthesia to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

My thoughts exactly.

Like the others have pointed out, this is called synesthesia and is a known phenomenon that is actually quite common on the spectrum.

I have it too, but in a different and milder way than you do. For me, smells have colors for example.

People who don't have synesthesia and haven't heard of it think it sounds really weird when we describe it and probably think we're nuts, but this is a real phenomenon.

For me, words are actually colors.

The way I understand the context of words and how I form words are through a form of picture moving blurs of colors. Creating people, but not really creating people.

This sounds ret*d.

Ah - thanks for that.

Another term to add to my list.

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Synesthetes often report that they were unaware their experiences were unusual until they realized other people did not have them, while others report feeling as if they had been keeping a secret their entire lives, as has been documented in interviews with synesthetes on how they discovered synesthesia in their childhood

Also this part explains alot for me:

Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP, or personification for short) is a form of synesthesia in which ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, days, months and letters are associated with personalities


Numbers have always had distinct personalities to me, since I first learned about them. I tend to be moderately face blind as well but I often have an association - a color or sound associated with a person I've met before, even if I can't place them or come up with a name or anything about them. And it's impossible to say to someone I have no idea who you are or where I know you from but you're a lavender so I know you're safe and an okay person so I'm glad to see you. THOSE associations I have always kept to myself.

I have a similar experience. So no worries.

I am skeptical as to whether I have it because it can feel really subtle, but for me music has color and colors have flavor. One shade of yellow actually made me nauseous while I was in middle school / junior high.

Same here.

I understand perfectly. I don't have that particular form of sensory cross-wiring, but I do have synaesthesia.

if a person sees people's faces in the juxtoposition of the minute and hour hands of an analog clock face, is that the same thing? just curious.

Could be personification of that inanimate object (the clock) so I'd say possibly.

I remember when I worked in a resteraunt I hid a whole raw chicken on the other side of a cieling tile over the workstation of two of my tormentors when I went away for a two week vaction. When I got back they said they could feel the smell of the rotting chicken. They got back at me by covering a raw chicken with charcoal dust and hid it under a rotissery oven that was next to my work station and when I found it then ran with it out side people said it was like a ribbon of stink or wall like area of stench generated by the chicken like I dragged the smell behind me. It was like a kick to the nose.

When my father was in Vietnam he was setting up a claymore mine and stumbled on a dead NVA soldier who hid under a fallen log when he moved the log it caused a stench he described as wrapping his head in warm wet towel of stench. They had already pretty much set up the ambush and it was getting dark so they had to stick it out. He said all night they heard their buddies retching from the stink but to their amazement the NVA came looking to see what the stink was so they lit them up. They never leave their dead for the Americans to find so they could deney them a bodycount.