synaesthesia is a complicated and difficult to describe thing. i have noticed different phenomena, which i'll now try to characterise:
first there is sensory input that is represented using a different sense. for instance i had while listening to psytrance seen one blue dot for every kickdrum slowly move from the right to the left through my field of vision. i didn't really see the music and found the whole thing utterly boring. actually i didn't even consider that to be synaesthesia until a friend alterted me to this.
the second thing is when you perceive one thing additionally in another sense. for instance seeing something you touch as coloured shapes or music becoming just as much a tactile experience as an auditory one. this is entirely different, because it's really felt as perceiving that particular thing. i could instantly recognise different pieces of clothing with eyes closed even if the tactile input would be removed from my perception or recognise different tracks based completely on tactile perception.
the third kind of synaethesia would be the senses melting together (probably as a continuation of #2), so that every perception becomes just a "mental object" with the sense that brought the information for creating this mental object being completely irrelevant. this is something i only got pretty high doses...
for me tryptamines rarely get me anything other than the first kind, but lsd on the other hand is highly synaesthetic.
first there is sensory input that is represented using a different sense. for instance i had while listening to psytrance seen one blue dot for every kickdrum slowly move from the right to the left through my field of vision. i didn't really see the music and found the whole thing utterly boring. actually i didn't even consider that to be synaesthesia until a friend alterted me to this.
the second thing is when you perceive one thing additionally in another sense. for instance seeing something you touch as coloured shapes or music becoming just as much a tactile experience as an auditory one. this is entirely different, because it's really felt as perceiving that particular thing. i could instantly recognise different pieces of clothing with eyes closed even if the tactile input would be removed from my perception or recognise different tracks based completely on tactile perception.
the third kind of synaethesia would be the senses melting together (probably as a continuation of #2), so that every perception becomes just a "mental object" with the sense that brought the information for creating this mental object being completely irrelevant. this is something i only got pretty high doses...
for me tryptamines rarely get me anything other than the first kind, but lsd on the other hand is highly synaesthetic.
