We All Have Synesthesia

Do you taste something bitter when you hear the right word? Maybe you see a flash of a certain color instead. If so, you might have synesthesia. But it turns out, we're ALL capable of having different senses interact with one another in some pretty weird ways.

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Sources:

[christineg]

There's a significant flaw in the study that used the coarse vs fine sugar and determined that a fine texture results in a higher perception of sweet. Since they used sugar as their source of sweetness, the finer texture is going to dissolve more easily, resulting in a stronger sweet taste, even if they have a similar mass of sugar present. Coarser sugar means less sugar contacts the taste receptors regardless of how much overall sugar is there. As it is, all they really determined is that food containing sugar delivered in a form that's easier to dissolve tastes sweeter. If they want to establish the effect of texture on taste, they really need a non-flavored method of affecting texture.

[omegahaxors-]

"We played holiday music and asked them to rate the taste of the food. Overwhelmingly people rated food as having had tasted better, with the exception of one group of outliers who were convinced that the food was rotten; all of whom worked retail"

[emewyn]

One weird symptom of depression is that it can actually make your senses feel dulled. I've heard people say colors and music feel more vivid after recovering from severe depressive episodes. Personally, I've had really bad mental health days where i genuinely thought I had caught covid because the taste and smell of my food was so different. Makes sense, if mood and pleasure can affect our senses like that.

[seattlegrrlie]

Certain flavors are "warm" or "cold" and it has nothing to do with the temperature of the food itself. You could give me a burning hot cucumber and I'd still brain it as cold.

[bomafett]

I’m not sure these are really examples of synesthesia. One of the best representations of synesthesia I’ve ever seen is in the movie Ratatouille, when Remy hears music and sees color explosions when he eats. It’s not just one sense influencing another, it’s one sense activating another. The food didn’t make the music or colors more intense or more pleasant, it created the colors and music altogether.

[xazz]

Shout out to the stock video guy at 6:40 cutting a ciabatta sandwich with a butter knife and fork

[dion]

My sister "tastes" color: sweet, sour, salted, bland. She once said "I can't stand [brother], living room color, it makes me nauseous as it tastes too sweet." She is awesome as decoding paint colors.

[markedis]

4:18 More surface area on ground sugar so it dissolves faster and tastes sweeter than coarse sugar.

[scriptorpaulina]

It’s called ideasthesia—that used to be my tumblr blog name. It’s why people generally think that boba sounds round and kiki sounds pointy

[graywulf]

"I'm looking at you Cap'n Crunch." Never have I felt more validated.

[MintLeshey]

Could also be expectations and how people select something when given an ambiguous question like pick what this scent smells like. We know candy canes are red and peppermint. We associate some things with others because people portray them like that. A gross smell is green or yellow in cartoons. Bile, sulfur and some sickly stool is similar in color. We said yes this color is stinky. It might be less synesthesia and more shared experience influencing what we pick.

[RechtmanDon]

My synesthesia is linguistic: I have the continuous voice dialogue going on in my head, but there's also a simultaneous music dialogue paralleling the voice. While looking at a painting, the verbal voice in my head might say "Wow, that's beautiful!", and at the same time, the non-verbal music voice might say "Da da da da dahh." This happens with any silent, read or spoken verbal sounds, meaning that I can hear the music of people, places, things, ideas, feelings, etc. If I have access to a music keyboard, I can share those musical "thoughts" with others.

[benjaminfinlay]

I have a form of synethesia myself.

Sensations inside my nose get translated to scents. If it's hot out, I can smell heat. Likewise with cold. And if I get bopped hard enough on the nose, the scent of pain is sharp and unmistakable.

I can also _taste_ temperatures (though this might be cross-modal).

It's rather annoying at times, though (for example, the taste of heat clashes _horribly_ with the taste of pepperoni, so for me pepperoni pizza is disgusting when hot, and delicious when cold).

[samuelzackrisson]

A question about the taste one. wouldn't the smaller sugar grains dissolve quicker in your mouth and thus taste sweeter than the bigger rougher sugar grains?

[Grommish]

I remember Purple Heinz ketchup. People couldn't adjust the color VS flavor and it tanked.

[Elaneonline]

This is cool! I'm someone who actually has synaesthesia in the traditional sense (some examples: 0:15 "Phillip" is a pink name with some gold-yellow spots/highlights; Adenosine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine of DNA are red with some orange, yellow-orange with some light green, green, and light blue respectively, with the dominant colours being Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue). Synaesthesia also runs in families in my experience, my mother and I both have it (myself to a greater extent) but my dad doesn't. My mother and I are both also neurodivergent (ADHD and Asperger's/ASD), but I seem to have more symptoms/be slightly further "on the spectrum". Also, it might be a case of like attracting like but several of my friends who are also on the spectrum also experience synaesthesia of various senses. I suspect that the hyperconnected nervous systems of people with ASD and ADHD causes their brains to be "cross-wired" and process sensory information in multiple areas of the brain.

[LoreTheDarkElf]

Not terribly surprised. Right up there with food tasting better in good company. We are highly social animals so all of our senses contribute to our experience of the world-- the brain being the engine that facilitates it.

[rhoharane]

3:30 this is one of the fundamental ideas of sound design in entertainment like movies and video games. You can't feel anything on screen so the sounds have to carry the weight of communicating what things feel like: if the ground feels gravely or grassy, or the object is made of wood or stone or sand or if it's hollow or full of water. This also means badly-designed sounds can inexplicably make the game feel icky or disconnected. Some people can be more sensitive to the effect than others but well-designed sounds benefits most hearing people.

[CaedmonOS]

If I'm trying to go to sleep and something very loud happens, it's almost like I get flashbanged.

[baileyhenderson]

I find if I have ear plugs in at work when I eat my lunch I don't taste the food as strongly. and when I take them out I can immediately notice my food tastes better. Also if I suddenly get startled by a loud noise, I often notice a flash of white light across my vision.