Natural Synesthesia

[alantis360]

Solipsis: changed thread title to Natural Synaesthesia as opposed to induced synaesthesia (search for other thread on that)

If you are someone who experiences synesthesia daily even while sober. What happens when you are tripping? Or does it change at all?

Also if you have experienced it on psychedelics tell your experience.

 

[sackynut]

I dont get it too much sober (besides some minor psychedelic-esque synesthesia.

While on psychs I can visualize my music with extreme ease, but thats about the extend of it.
Its hard for some people with extreme synesthesia to know they have it, much like how a crazy person doesnt know theyre crazy, thats the way lifes been so its hard to distinguish. But i dont know the ins and outs of synesthesia so ill stop talking.

 

[rocker97x]

The main synesthesia that i get is visualization of panning effects and filter use. Really helps for learning to synth new sounds.

 

[knock]

I wonder how many true "synaesthetes" will respond to this. I don't think that many actually exist.

I don't consider myself to have "proper" synaesthesia but smells have a strong association with colours for me. It's probably a learned, or subconsciously willed, association, rather than a neurological idiosyncrasy, but I don't know how that would have come about.

I passed a chemical plant which was emitting a sweetish, very "artificial" odour and my reaction was to describe the smell as pink. A very complex, rich fart is typically tartan. I have a friend who often seems to produce these tartan farts. There was a man at a train station once who smelled a bit like this but he was more checked than tartan - less shitty but still unpleasant. I've never been a fan of tartan despite being a Scot.

On the right drugs and the right music I see the music on the back of my eyelids like everyone else...

 

[Solipsis]

Apparently estimations range from 1 in 200 to 1 in 100000, although a less retarded range proposed is between 1 in 2000 to 1 in 25000.


Synaesthesia is awesome, I had it only on a couple of occasions with psychedelics. During my very first acid trip I said to my dad: even as a word blue is my favorite color, and I could taste pastel blue and hear it and feel it.
During my first or second mushroom trip I have seen visualizations of music in my head or mind's eye, they were like dancing oscillations.

 

[whopz]

synaesthesia is a weird one. i have distinct colours associated with some everyday words. it's not as if i visualise words in my mind in a particular colour but there is a strong feeling that the colour is somehow attributed to the particular word. it's very difficult to explain.

examples

phenethylamine feels blue
tryptamine feels green (nothing to do with visuals i get on either)

probably not anything to do with synaesthesia but strange nonetheless

 

[blowjay]

Apparently estimations range from 1 in 200 to 1 in 100000, although a less retarded range proposed is between 1 in 2000 to 1 in 25000.


Synaesthesia is awesome, I had it only on a couple of occasions with psychedelics. During my very first acid trip I said to my dad: even as a word blue is my favorite color, and I could taste pastel blue and hear it and feel it.
During my first or second mushroom trip I have seen visualizations of music in my head or mind's eye, they were like dancing oscillations.

Lucky F, my dad is too much of a tool to even know what tripping is.

 

[isobob]

I am a synesthete

I have grapheme-color synesthesia.

Something I would like to clear up is that many of you might expect natural synesthesia to be similar to drug-induced synesthesia. It is not really like the sort of synesthesia you would experience on a psychedelic much at all.

With psychedelic synesthesia, you get an actual illusory sense that somehow connects to another sense. Natural synesthesia is not at all a hallucination/visual in the way you would experience with a psychedelic. With natural synesthesia, there is a very clear distinction between your actual senses and your synesthetic sense. Because of this, it is never distracting or annoying at all, at least for me.

What I mean by this is, despite my synesthesia, when I look at this post I am writing, I literally see every letter as black, exactly as anyone else would. Synesthesia in no way alters or changes my normal sensory perception. However, kind of in parallel with my normal sight, there is an additional, perceived color for each letter/digit.

This is not the same as an association. It's not how a non-synesthete would associate "orange" with the color orange. In that case, there is some thought involved, some sort of mental connection to be made. For me, my synesthetic colors are perceived instantly, immediately, just as readily as any other normal sense perceives. I do not have to call up anything from memory, or think about it. It's just always, involuntarily there.

Serotonergic psychedelics sort of increase my synesthesia. They don't just `turn up the volume' though, they actually change the subjective quality of the synesthesia. All the synesthetic colors remain the same, but the synesthetic sense begins to blend a bit with my actual, real vision. This was most obvious when on 2C-E, when looking at some text I would literally see the synesthetic colors seep into my 'normal' sensory channels. It changed my synesthesia into a true visual effect.

If anyone else has questions about synesthesia, I would love to answer them!

 

[alantis360]

I have grapheme-color synesthesia.

Something I would like to clear up is that many of you might expect natural synesthesia to be similar to drug-induced synesthesia. It is not really like the sort of synesthesia you would experience on a psychedelic much at all.

With psychedelic synesthesia, you get an actual illusory sense that somehow connects to another sense. Natural synesthesia is not at all a hallucination/visual in the way you would experience with a psychedelic. With natural synesthesia, there is a very clear distinction between your actual senses and your synesthetic sense. Because of this, it is never distracting or annoying at all, at least for me.

What I mean by this is, despite my synesthesia, when I look at this post I am writing, I literally see every letter as black, exactly as anyone else would. Synesthesia in no way alters or changes my normal sensory perception. However, kind of in parallel with my normal sight, there is an additional, perceived color for each letter/digit.

This is not the same as an association. It's not how a non-synesthete would associate "orange" with the color orange. In that case, there is some thought involved, some sort of mental connection to be made. For me, my synesthetic colors are perceived instantly, immediately, just as readily as any other normal sense perceives. I do not have to call up anything from memory, or think about it. It's just always, involuntarily there.

Serotonergic psychedelics sort of increase my synesthesia. They don't just `turn up the volume' though, they actually change the subjective quality of the synesthesia. All the synesthetic colors remain the same, but the synesthetic sense begins to blend a bit with my actual, real vision. This was most obvious when on 2C-E, when looking at some text I would literally see the synesthetic colors seep into my 'normal' sensory channels. It changed my synesthesia into a true visual effect.

If anyone else has questions about synesthesia, I would love to answer them!

Does anything happen when you listen to music?

 

[isobob]

No, I don't really have any sort of music synesthesia. Just like most everyone else, though, I can imagine/associate colors, textures, or other sorts of senses with different types of music or sounds. This definitely isn't really a synesthetic experience like my grapheme-color synesthesia, though.

I think many people with music/pitch synesthesia have perfect pitch, something I also lack

 

[psood0nym]

I have grapheme-color synesthesia.

Something I would like to clear up is that many of you might expect natural synesthesia to be similar to drug-induced synesthesia. It is not really like the sort of synesthesia you would experience on a psychedelic much at all.

With psychedelic synesthesia, you get an actual illusory sense that somehow connects to another sense. Natural synesthesia is not at all a hallucination/visual in the way you would experience with a psychedelic. With natural synesthesia, there is a very clear distinction between your actual senses and your synesthetic sense. Because of this, it is never distracting or annoying at all, at least for me.

What I mean by this is, despite my synesthesia, when I look at this post I am writing, I literally see every letter as black, exactly as anyone else would. Synesthesia in no way alters or changes my normal sensory perception. However, kind of in parallel with my normal sight, there is an additional, perceived color for each letter/digit.

This is not the same as an association. It's not how a non-synesthete would associate "orange" with the color orange. In that case, there is some thought involved, some sort of mental connection to be made. For me, my synesthetic colors are perceived instantly, immediately, just as readily as any other normal sense perceives. I do not have to call up anything from memory, or think about it. It's just always, involuntarily there.

Serotonergic psychedelics sort of increase my synesthesia. They don't just `turn up the volume' though, they actually change the subjective quality of the synesthesia. All the synesthetic colors remain the same, but the synesthetic sense begins to blend a bit with my actual, real vision. This was most obvious when on 2C-E, when looking at some text I would literally see the synesthetic colors seep into my 'normal' sensory channels. It changed my synesthesia into a true visual effect.

If anyone else has questions about synesthesia, I would love to answer them!

Would it be accurate to say psychedelics temporarily modulate you from a synaesthetic "associator" to a synaesthetic "projector"? That is, psychedelics allow you to see the color associations out in your environment?

 

[synchrojet]

I have it as a side effect of schizophrenia. The above poster is correct in stating that it differs from psychedelic induced synesthesia. But I get it differently than he does. I don't see parallel colors to letters, I see them to sound. And the colors aren't easily described. It's not as if someone plays an A 440 on the piano (I have perfect relative pitch, but not perfect pitch) and the color red appears in the air. I can only say it is a visual sensation that directly correlates with pitch and tone. At times I get other sense crossing that is very difficult to describe, like hearing a corner or smelling the fact that something happened, but those sort of occurrences tend to appear during acute episodes (I'm episodic).

 

[allium]

Awesome reports, guys!!!
I always wondered how normal synaesthia feels.

It's just always, involuntarily there.

Can you instantly see triangle formed by twos on this picture from wikipedia article?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Synaesthesiatest.jpg
I realize that you may not experience these effects from 2 and 5, but can you do this for other graphemes?

and the colors aren't easily described.

What do you mean by this? Are they "normal" but difficult to describe for some reason, or are they "imagined" colors - totally different from "normal" colors?

How do you perceive synaesthesia to music, and not to just single tones?
Did you ever take psychedelics? How did it feel on them?

 

[isobob]

I don't instantly see the triangle of the twos, although I can pick it out within 2 seconds or so. The thing with this image is that they make the 2s so similar to the 5s that it makes it a little tricky even for a synesthete. It's an involuntary and instant perception as soon as the grapheme is recognized. If graphemes are altered/hidden in such a way to make recognition difficult, then the synesthesia doesn't just work magic like that.

No, psychedelics do not change me from an associator to a projector. The synesthetic color is already projected directly on the grapheme, it has a definite location; it's not like it just brings up the feeling of the color in my mind. The actual letter has the synesthetic color on it.

2C-E just caused the synesthetic colors to be hallucinated somewhat as an actual visual sense. I don't think normal, natural synesthesia is ever experienced this way (although I could be wrong, it may differ for other synesthetes).

 

[isobob]

But similar to the picture with the 2s and 5s is an effect that illustrates what I mean by involuntary and instant.

Looking at a page/paragraph of text, I do not have to look at each letter individually to see its synesthetic color. All of the letters near and around the center of my vision have the corrent synesthetic colors. I can instantly perceive the pattern of colors the letters make across the entire paragraph or most of the page, all at once, just at a glance, without thinking about it or making any effort to do so.

 

[Lazyscience]

one time on mushrooms i was eating a chocolate cookie and i could hear the flavour. it sounded chocolatey. im serious too.

 

[allium]

I don't instantly see the triangle of the twos, although I can pick it out within 2 seconds or so. The thing with this image is that they make the 2s so similar to the 5s that it makes it a little tricky even for a synesthete.

Ok, thank you for your explanation, I think now I have better understanding of how your type of synesthesia works. Though it is still quite difficult to imagine how it is perceived... Is it like you perceive 2 images, one is a normal image, with black graphemes, and another one is different, it contains only graphems which have colors?

All of the letters near and around the center of my vision have the corrent synesthetic colors.

Interesting. Looking directly at the center of your post, I can't recognize graphemes near the post boundaries. So, looking in the center of a post, you can perceive colors only from some part of post?

Also, does your synesthesia helps with recognizing wrongly spelled letters/sentences? Or maybe you can reocgnize such words more easily(just because you recognize grahpemes itself better than normal people)?

 

[psilocybonaut]

I read that most (like 90%+) people with natural synaesthesia don't consider it a problem at all, and many actually find it pleasurable.

 

[psood0nym]

Do these Roman numerals evoke the color of their respective numbers where applicable (like 4), the letters "I," "V," and "X," none of these options, or does it depend on how you think about it?

Do you get anything from this?

Are certain fonts more vivid? I hear helevetica is the most widely used font. Does the vividness of the color auras just correspond to the style you're most exposed to?

Are there any colors that you've never seen in the environment? I've always wondered if the alternate processing pathways involved in synesthetic color production could evoke color qualia that don't exist in the experiential range of the average human perceptual spectrum (like a fourth "primary"). Thanks!

 

[synchrojet]

To answer the color question - its more of an effect, like Magic Bullet in film editing or some such. Certain sounds produce an effect that might be described as luminous or silvery, while others produce effects that might be described as blurry or "browned down". It's not like there's a color chart that could be printed up to demonstrate it, but the effects are consistent with the sounds. As a kid I always thought everybody saw it - indeed it was a class discussion about this very thing that led to the early doc visits that led to everything else.