Do you associate a certain sense with another sense?

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Studies suggest that people with an autism spectrum condition are more likely to have synesthesia (when you associate one sense with another one). I do associate some senses with other senses.

Do you do this?

I think I confuse emotions with physical sensations sometimes.

I don't

Synesthesia comes in two varieties:active and passive.

Active is when your mind forces you to see things upon say-hearing certain sounds. Not exactly a hallucination, but not exactly voluntary thought either.

Passive is the more common thing of associating concepts with stimuli (like seeing numbers as having colors). I have the later. To me numbers have color, gender, and personality. Or at least first ten integers do.have since first grade.

To me fresh fruits have a bright shiny flavor..Images of diamonds and jewels and gold coins go through my head when I eat oranges, or apples. Strawberries when they're sliced look somewhat like rubies, and thats how their taste looks too me as well. The one person I confided this fruit thing thought it was "gross!".

Dont know if either kind of synesthesia is more prevelent among aspies/auties or not. The subject does crop up occasionally on the WP forum.

But I suspect that most folks have some degree of synesthesia. Otherwise why would the famous Motown singer have been nicknamed "Smokey" Robinson? And why would Mel Torme be nicknamed "the Velvet Fog"?

Not sure if this qualifies but many everyday, run-of-the-mill sounds I hear create STRONG emotions and a sort of psychic pain (like you would get from someone running their nails down a chalkboard). It seems my auditory processing mechanisms are mixed with the emotional centers in my brain (think there is a theory on this).

Okay, I've never tried to put this into words before but sounds are not straight forward for me. They're kind of accompanied by color and texture and emotion. I'm embarrassed to admit to people that I don't listen to music too much because it makes me feel things and sometimes that's exhausting and overwhelming. My friend turned on "soothing" music for our visit one day and I had to ask her to turn it off because I couldn't think with the scratchy, bump creating, distraction of it. To me it was like a little skunk crooning in the corner of the room, I kept looking at the speaker because any minute it might spew forth some toxic smell or harmful painful sound.
When I watch TV I prefer to have the closed captioning on because if there's music and other noises at the same time as the words, I can't hear them. It's not that I can't physically hear them but they can't go into my brain audibly because so much else is already being processed. I can read them so much quicker and get them in without all the added layers. Sometimes I wonder if I don't like social interactions because I miss half of what people are saying. I hear the emotions and intonations more strongly then their words and people don't necessarily want you to respond to their emotions and hidden agendas. Maybe that's off topic. Sorry.

I see sounds... and particularly music... as colours and patterns, sometimes as textures which can also be felt.

I've played in a lot of bands in the past (mostly sax and flute but also with bass guitar) and a lot of it was going on in the visual realm. Particularly improvising with sax... it was like weaving patterns.

I've been seeing numbers and days of the week as colours since I was about 5. It's rather vividly in my mind. But I don't get confused though.

Monday is green
Tuesday is brown
Wednesday is red
Thursday is gold or yellow
Friday is white
Saturday is white
Sunday is black

The days of the week have always been those colours for me.

When I look at bugs I can feel them at the back of my throat. And when someone sneezes, even if they are yards away and facing opposite myself, I feel spit drops on my cheek. Do these count?

I see smells as colored smoke/fog

I remember in school when I was about 11 in art class, we all had to listen to music on a tape and draw how we 'saw' the music, and everybody did. Nobody was allowed to copy each other, but we pretty much all came up with almost the same sort of patterns, including me (I was the only Aspie in the class).

If only! I've been fascinated by the idea ever since I heard of it.

I have a connection of color, sound, and touch. I can feel and see music and certain sounds (which often form different shapes), occasionally see and hear touch when I feel a particularly strong sensation, and sometimes visualize the texture and sounds of certain colors. I thought it was normal until I read about synesthesia when I was 12.

emotion to color saturation, color to sound

I have Spatial Sequence Synesthesia, meaning I can essentially "see" time out in space around me. I can always see the same picture of specific sequences out around me, always in the same shape. For me, I picture months of the year, years themselves, days of the week, and most numbers in general out in space in odd, twisting shapes.

As both synesthesia and autism are thought to be caused by a lack of synaptic pruning in the brain, it makes sense why more autistic people would have synesthesia when compared with the general population.