Rare but Real: People Who Feel, Taste and Hear Color...

www.livescience.com...

When Ingrid Carey says she feels colors, she does not mean she sees red, or feels blue, or is green with envy. She really does feel them.

She can also taste them, and hear them, and smell them.

The 20-year-old junior at the University of Maine has synesthesia, a rare neurological condition in which two or more of the senses entwine. Numbers and letters, sensations and emotions, days and months are all associated with colors for Carey.

The letter "N" is sienna brown; "J" is light green; the number "8" is orange; and July is bluish-green.

The pain from a shin split throbs in hues of orange and yellow, purple and red, Carey told LiveScience.

Colors in Carey's world have properties that most of us would never dream of: red is solid, powerful and consistent, while yellow is pliable, brilliant and intense. Chocolate is rich purple and makes Carey’s breath smell dark blue. Confusion is orange.

this is wierd

it must get annoying to live your life this way...

here is a pic of what she sees...

here is this scientific acceptance:

Long dismissed as a product of overactive imaginations or a sign of mental illness, synesthesia has grudgingly come to be accepted by scientists in recent years as an actual phenomenon with a real neurological basis. Some researchers now believe it may yield valuable clues to how the brain is organized and how perception works.

"The study of synesthesia [has] encouraged people to rethink historical ideas that synesthesia was abnormal and an aberration," says Amy Ione, director of the Diatrope Institute, a California-based group interested in the arts and sciences.

The cause remains a mystery, however.

According to one idea, irregular sprouting of new neural connections within the brain leads to a breakdown of the boundaries that normally exist between the senses. In this view, synesthesia is the collective chatter of sensory neighbors once confined to isolation.

Another theory, based on research conducted by Daphne Maurer and Catherine Mondloch at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, suggests all infants may begin life as synesthetes. In this way of thinking, animals and humans are born with immature brains that are highly malleable. Connections between different sensory parts of the brain exists that later become pruned or blocked as an organism matures, Mondloch explained.

Maurer and Mondloch hypothesize that if these connections between the senses are functional, as some experiments suggest, then infants should experience the world in a way that is similar to synesthetic adults.

In a variation of this theory, babies don’t have five distinct senses but rather one all-encompassing sense that responds to the total amount of incoming stimulation. So when a baby hears her mother’s voice, she is also seeing it and smelling it.

i once saw a show about this so i must say, i believe it...

Well I'm not as bad the the above mentioned examples but I do see colors when listening to music.
For example: 'Welcome to the Jungle' by Gun's & Roses is different shades of orange & reddish yellows. 'Smell's like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana is aqua bluish green. 'The Four Horsemen' by Metallica in Red while 'Enter sandman in Black. WHOA wait a minute theses colors correspond to the colors on the album cover. But Everything by the Tragically Hip is gray cause there blah.

Originally posted by BattleofBatoche
Well I'm not as bad the the above mentioned examples but I do see colors when listening to music.
For example: 'Welcome to the Jungle' by Gun's & Roses is different shades of orange & reddish yellows. 'Smell's like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana is aqua bluish green. 'The Four Horsemen' by Metallica in Red while 'Enter sandman in Black. WHOA wait a minute theses colors correspond to the colors on the album cover. But Everything by the Tragically Hip is gray cause there blah.

where do you see these colors???

do they move around???

this is amazing

They swirl around in my head usually brightening and dimming depending on the tempo.

Originally posted by BattleofBatoche
They swirl around in my head usually brightening and dimming depending on the tempo.

do you get annoyed by it or are you use to things like this occuring to you???

i would get annoyed

I hear its quite common actually. I just asked my dad about this and he said he gets similiary sensations. I believe it has somthing to do with an overactive part of the brain, or maybe a crossed wire or somthing. I know on certain narcotics this can happen(not sure which anyone know???), so its not surprising that this would happen to people normally. Sound and Sight are probably very closely tied together.

Originally posted by sardion2000
I hear its quite common actually. I just asked my dad about this and he said he gets similiary sensations. I believe it has somthing to do with an overactive part of the brain, or maybe a crossed wire or somthing. I know on certain narcotics this can happen(not sure which anyone know???), so its not surprising that this would happen to people normally. Sound and Sight are probably very closely tied together.

yes...

drugs can make you see things such as this (not that i know by experience or anything)

but the wierdest thing about all this is tasting color...

this is very wierd

I find this a fascinating topic.

Among the famous who have had this condition is the composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Here is a .pdf entitled 'Synesthetic Sensor Fusion Via A Cross-Wired Artificial Neural Network' which some might find interesting.

I cannot remember who it was but a while back I did read of another composer who attended a particular concert repeatedly as a child and was reportedly very surprised to discover that others could not see the spectular light show which he could.

Jack

Its not bad when it just happens for a small time and can even be cool.
But durning what I call brain storms it can get very bad and gets to the point you want to scream at times . Just like that ever thing starts coming in all at once mixed toghter i cant even describe what it looks like .
this last from 2 hours to 3 days . Of corse if I lived with it on high at all times it wouldent bother me as much .what makes it hard is i can be realy close to normal for weeks at times.Then it hits me all at once like a ton of bricks.
Personly Im tired of it and have found a docter who will hopfuly be able to give me something to lessen it.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Here is a thread of something familiar ...

Well now I know Im not the only one around who can taste color and have olifactory capabilities of smelling colors too. I was very young when I first noticed this strange thing and just thought I'd grow out of it. Wrong. Still now at 46 it is still with me and it appears it is more accute too. It does not happen to me every day but often enoungh to where I can notice it. I told my mom when I was around 13 and she wanted to know what I was smoking. Come to find out yrs. later, she had the same ability. Pretty cool but it is hard to describe to people who just say it is not possible or refuse to believe.

This is a very interesting subject......I want to know a little bit more, from thos eof you here you say they have this.......when you "taste" color, do you get the reference in your head/minds eye, or do you see it in real time, out in the real world? Same question with "hearing" color.


I'm one of those boring people who can only "see" color........but at least I do that every day!!

Ya! It's called doing too much acid. And for once I am not being sarcastic.

Originally posted by Jonna
Ya! It's called doing too much acid. And for once I am not being sarcastic.

I have to disagree with your one liner there. Though I do not feel, taste or hear color, per say.....I am extremely effected by color. So strongly so I can feel my moods being changed depending on the colors .

Oh yeah....for the record, this has been discussed here before.....I'll try to find the link.

[edit on 2/22/2005 by LadyV]