who here can associate smell with color?

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this is really weird, sometimes a certain perfume or scent can remind me
of a color, or even taste for example strawberry lollypop can feel like I'm tasting
the color pink, tomato soup can taste like red, and lemonade tastes like yellow.

Even smelly things have a color, like garbage smells greenish, bad eggs smell dark yellow etc.

perfumes have sort of a color combo.

That is called synaesthesia. Here is a wikpedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaesthesia

I myself don't experience that, but it sounds rather neat.

I think it's hard to know what associations are purely from Synaesthesia, and what associations are learned associations. I have synaesthesia but only mildly, and I associate words / letters / numbers / music with colours. But not smells

I see days of the week in colour. Monday is red or rddish-pink, Tuesday is mid-blue, Wednesday is lemon yellow Thursday is royal blue, Griday is mid green, Saturday is dandelion yellow and Subday is navy blue.

Julie

I get color associations with letters. But I can't recall every having it with numbers; maybe numbers are transparent

The letters the most easily come to mind are one that I have used a lot in programing:
i = ice white
j = diffused lime green
k = light blue
I don't get the sensation when reading, only when I'm visualizing the letter. Most of letters have color, but I can't always recognize what color it is. And some of them don't have color.

George Orwell may have had Synaesthesia. In 1984, the main character describes a 'yellow sound'.

I do sounds with shapes and color. Sometimes smells have colors and shapes too. Some letters have colors. It's not very consistent though. Music has many colors. That's when it really gets going. Hum's song, "Afternoon with Axolotis" is blue, purple, and green...like an abalone shell.

I have that a lot. a Dminor chord is dark blue, a Bflat minor is forest green. Smells are more perceived as shapes or texture, same thing with tastes. Some sensation provoque the idea of a movement. Those sensations comes in real-time when i perceive something. But when i recall a perception, it displays only the shape/texture/movement/colour in my mind. The original sensation (taste, smell, sounds etc...) is lost (except images).

i dont associate smells with colors, i associate some smells with feelings.
the one that pops into my head right now is that i have an old bear that when i rub up against my face, it smells like calm
the smell of him calms me down.

The last time I droped acid I could do this. I have'nt been able to do it sober though.

I associate some colours with taste, smell or feelings. When I think of red, it reminds me of strawberries, I hate strawberries so I don't like the colour red much. I associate pink with strawberry milkshake and I don't like that either hence I don't like pink very much.

However, I associate the colour blue with the smell of the sea and with tranquility and calmness, hence it is my favourite colour (its a beautiful colour anyway). I also like the colour yellow as it makes me think of a hot sunny day and I associate it with custard and I like custard. (I have a real food fetish if anyone hasn't guessed this already).

Lol I find with numbers I have good and bad colours - 4 and 9 are exactly the same shade of red, for example, but 4's a good red and 9's a horrific red. *shrugs*

Days of the week are coloured too Most things are.

Yeah I do.

Lollies sorta taste yellow to me.
Rotten vegetables smell off green/brown
Food colouring tastes red
cat crap smells reddish brown
bad eggs smell a snotty yellow/green colour
chocolate drink tastes purpleish
Cake tastes a light yellowish colour.

I associate almost everything with colors--letters, names, words, people, numbers, songs, smells, etc. The interesting thing is that a particular thing can have more than one color to it--actually, most things seem to have two or three colors. In most of my associations, one color has a dominance, and there are little whorls or flecks or, most often, sort of borders of the secondary colors at the side of my 'association.'

For instance, to me, my internet name, Sola, is white with a little cream/yellow and gold/orange in it (Catella, which I don't always add, is mostly gold with a little red-brown and lighter orange), but my real name, Erin, is green with gold and brown and just a little ivory. My father is black and red with a little blue, and my mother is more of a brick-red color with some brown and bluish-green. The word synaesthasia itself is white with purple.

It seems a bit silly to be prejudiced against red merely because strawberries are red and you hate strawberries. There are thousands of different things that are red, and by no means are strawberries the mascot of the color red -- they are just 1 example among many. I think you are placing very excessive significance on the connection between red and strawberries.

Also, what you wrote seems to be more a case of regular mental association than actual synesthesia. As I understand it, there is a substantial difference between associating colors with things versus synesthesia. Everyone makes associations, whereas only a few people have synesthesia.

I do things like that quite a bit but that is more related to OCD for me. BUT - the feelings with the associations can be quite strong and not something that can easily be dismissed. Although that goes beyond what would be considered normal associations. I think the key difference though is that the associations can be quite unwanted.

I think synesthesia is different from associations because different senses are being activated without any thought process involved. So you don't have to think of blue to smell something - it just happens. Could be mistaken about that though.

I associate colours with names and days of the week and see them in colour. Sometimes i see a lot of colours and it hurts and I hear music in my head that i've not heard before, although sometmes I have heard it before or its one long note, sometimes blue.I see wednesday as blue and my own name.