My Synesthesia

The Types I Have

The above video is made by a girl with a rarer form of synesthesia that I happen to have as well.

So I actually have quite a few types of synesthesia. Here's the ones I have:

Grapheme-color: Letters and numbers (graphemes) are connected to a color. Like 2 is a very pale pink, and 4 is forest green. If I see a grapheme that is connected to a color, there will be a copy of the number in my mind's eye that will be colored, but the image that's actually there will be whatever color it's printed in or... projected in or... whatever you want to say :P. Not all letters are colored for me, however. This type is actually quite common, though.

Chromesthesia: When I hear sounds, I see certain colors and imagery. This one's not always consistent, but I've noticed that deeper sounds seem to be a darker color. This is also a common form. Some chromesthesia synesthetes have been known to paint or draw what they see when listening to music or another sound.

Ticker-tape: This one's much less common, and it's not even on the Wikipedia page :P. This is when words I hear on TV shows or in a conversation or if I'm imagining a scenario and there's dialogue appear in subtitles. Sometimes it can get really annoying, though. For example, I've been learning German with this thing called Duolingo, and there's a part where you have to listen to some audio and type what you hear. With the ticker-tape, my brain sometimes changes the spelling to what it sounds like in English or as a word I've heard before and it messes me up so I end up forgetting what the word is ( like "süß", meaning "sweet", shows up as "Zeus" in the captions, and I know that's not correct, so I have no clue as to what it is).

Spatial Sequence (SSS) - This one's kind of common, but I'm not sure. It's where things like numbers or years, months, weeks, and days are arranged as fixed points in space. Numbers, for me, appear in a horizontal line, and with my grapheme-color synesthesia, they're also colorful. Months appear to be in a vertical line of boxes that are, I guess, tall. The line's pretty thin. And it all seems to be bright lines separating them with a dark background and filling, like if you closed your eyes while in the dark. But there's actually more boxes than months, so the names of the months appear scattered. ERMAGHERD! It's so hard to explain. :P

Ordinal Linguist Personification (OLP) - WHOA. That's long :P. So this one's a lot less common. It's where letters, numbers, and words have personalities. Like 4 and 5 are male, and 6 is female and kind of fierce. Sooo... yeah. :D

Lexical-gustatory - This is another much less common form, and it's where words have flavors. Not all words have flavors to me, so I'm kind of trying to come up with an example. But for me, some numbers and letters also have flavor. Like 6 tastes like cinnamon.

So there's some weird synesthesia I have, too. I'm not even sure it has a name, but I know that some people have it. People and objects' appearances and personalities have flavors and textures and looks and all sorts of things like that. Like this one English teacher at my school this past year, her appearance was like celery in chicken broth. Her appearance just seemed to taste, look, and smell like that, but it's not like I could actually taste her. It was just her appearance. It's SO hard to explain this one. But there's a video I once watched by a person who described this kind of synesthesia. The video will be above.

So, yeah. I know this was long, but I just wanted you to be able to take a look inside my brain.

Keep bee-lieving! :D

~Bee-liever Apple