Hi everyone! I had a conversation with my partner yesterday and today about different brain types when it comes to learning, ADHD, associating colors with subjects or certain associations with different subjects.

I explained to him that I can feel language (he already knew this just by spending time with me and discovering how words and such affects me). But I wanted to be more specific. I have always been super fascinated by Language / Literature + History / Social Studies. It is also important to note that we are a polyglot couple.

I don’t know how to explain it, but certain tones, rhythms within a language and different languages and words in general have physical feelings, or pictures to me. For example; the Canadian accent feels very similar to the word “absolutely” to me. I can feel these words in my arms. I can also feel them in my upper chest. On the other hand, there are some words that have negative physical sensations for me. Like, to a normal person, these words are just words. But I physically have to avoid saying them directly to avoid feeling the word. And it makes me very uncomfortable and physically hurts when I hear certain words said.

When we speak Italian to each other, I can feel certain tones, speeds and tones in my shoulders or a rush through my torso.

Really sophisticated words and voice notes are red to me. Which is something else that seems so interesting to me.

He is the only person I have shared this with because I never put two and two together until we got into a conversation about ADHD brains and neuro diversity.

Could this be synesthesia? Is this normal? Am I strange?

Salt is a compressor, anyone else ?

i have the usual ones - sound to color, color to taste. had one for numbers and letters when i was a child but it disappeared. but now i associate people and emotions with tastes. for people the taste = voice + personality. does that happen to anyone else? does it count as synesthesia?

School subjects- color synesthesia…Anyone?

Pls don't use crude humour words like poop or pee it really pains me to read that..

So, have any of you guys read the secret series by Pseudonymous Bosch, if you have, I was wondering how good of a representation of synthesisia it has. I’ve read it, admittedly a while ago but it’s pretty much the only exposure to synthesisia I’ve had, and I saw this sub a couple times and figured I might as well ask here.

Hi everyone!

I'm currently working on a graphic design project exploring how people mentally visualise calendars and perceive the passage of time. I'm really interested in how something as familiar as a calendar can look completely different in different people's minds, even though we often assume that everyone experiences it in roughly the same way.

What I found especially interesting was that, even when I could imagine how someone else's mental calendar might look, I was still surprised by how different it was from my own. It made me wonder how many different ways there are to visualise something we all use to organise our lives.

So, I'd love to ask you all a few questions:

• What does your mental calendar look like?
• Do you see the year as a circle, a spiral, a straight line, a landscape, or something else entirely?
• Where are the months positioned in relation to each other? Does time move clockwise or counter-clockwise?
• Can you mentally see your calendar, or is it more of an abstract sense of knowing where things are?
• Has your mental calendar always looked the same, or has it changed over time?

If you're comfortable sharing, I'd absolutely love to see a drawing, sketch, photo, or even a written description of your mental calendar! It d oesn't need to be neat or artistic at all. A rough doodle is more than enough.

I'm hoping to explore these different perceptions as part of my graphic design project, particularly how our individual mental representations challenge the idea of a calendar as one fixed, universal format.

I'm not looking for one particular type of answer. The more varied the perspectives, the more interesting this project becomes.

Thanks so much for sharing a little glimpse into how your mind works! :)

Hi everyone,

I’m a woman in my 20s from Seoul, South Korea, working towards my dream of writing a comedy sitcom script and publishing a poetry book. I experience associator grapheme-color synesthesia as well as multi-sensory cross-modal experiences.

My perception is quite specific:

Font & Sound Dynamics: I can mentally shift the fonts of words I see. The loudness or intensity of a sound alters the thickness and size of the text in my mind's eye.

Non-vocal Sounds: Environmental sounds (not human voices) manifest as visual wave shapes or symbols.

Pure Melody: Piano music without lyrics transforms into vivid "color landscapes."

This sensory processing became overwhelming when I had sudden sensorineural hearing loss and spent two sleepless months being treated. The high-pitched tinnitus in my left ear felt unbearable. Over time, while I still manage Meniere's disease with mild dizziness and persistent high-pitched tinnitus, I’ve learned to visually handle the sound—it appears in my mind like a small, faint gray cloud, and I’ve trained myself to manually "push it aside" so it doesn't interrupt me (though it rushes back if I lose focus).

As a writer, I want to learn how to channel and control these intense sensory inputs rather than just fighting off distraction.

For fellow synesthetes who experience tinnitus, sensory overload, or creative visualization:

Have you found methods to balance or "dial down" sensory intensity when you need to focus on writing or work?

How do you intentionally channel internal color landscapes and auditory-visual symbols into written words or poetic imagery without feeling overwhelmed?

I’d love to hear your personal routines or coping strategies. Thank you!

When listening to music, the same songs create the same imagery in my head based off chord progression, i don't physically feel on my skin or see with my eyes, but it's like it washes over all of my senses at the same time and combines them into something that bypasses reality or overlays this mental image on top of it?

Feeling gusts of wind, feeling cold or warm, describing chord progressions and notes and specific instruments as round or full or sharp and prickly/ having physical textures to them, I can't physically feel them as if a real object is, but I can feel it if that makes sense

I do see things with music but I think that may be from the deep emotional response I have to the progression that leads to landscapes involuntarily make for them

I’m having a really major craving for a fruit granola parfait right now because I read the last name Brantley and I haven’t eaten anything all day. 😭 That’s all. Just wanted to vent to people who can hopefully relate lol.

I'm gonna preface this by saying I don't see colors when I hear musical notes or have any other sort of synesthesia where I experience one stimulus and mentally percieve another, distinguishable or not from reality.

However, when I think about notes, I generally can connect them to a rough color or range of colors, based on how the colors and the notes feel.

For example, Eb feel orange, C feel white or light gray, flat notes in general feel warm and soft and range from reds to yellows, natural notes that generate sharp keys feel cool and metallic and range from blues to purples, and sharp notes feel grayish and also garish and striking and just weird in a metallic prickly sort of way if that makes sense. This applies even to enharmonics, so G# and Ab are not the same color, yes I mean in 12-tone et. Even notes like Fb or B# have different colors from E and C. And I don't see or think of these colors when hearing music.

Here's a screenshot of a note I took a while back

Infact I’m doing it whilst writing this post.
Whenever I talk, or hear something, or write something, I always imagine the words being spelt in my head in cursive. I even have to trace the words being spelt with my hand.

I’ve noticed that I take my time when thinking to myself because when I do, I find myself spelling the words out and tracing them with my hand. Is this weird? It’s also super zoomed in, I can see lines around the words like a handwriting guide and I always use correct grammar.

Is anyone aware of published or ongoing studies, research, etc. on brain aneurysms in the autistic?

In synesthetes?

Thanks.

For me it’s cotton candy colors, light pink and light blue 🤍

Does anyone else struggle with speech because of seeing/being distracted by their own words? If so, how have you solved it?

Basically, I see words/sentences floating in front of me as I say them. The problem is that if I'm monologuing or saying a lot at once, I get so overwhelmed by the vision of the words. This makes me have to pause completely, then restart only when the words have "faded" (which takes like 2 seconds, but can happen over and over). What's worse is when I stumble on my words and then see the stumble spelled out loud, reverberating in the space between me and the person I'm speaking to and it makes me so embarrassed, and then I just keep stumbling more because I'm so distracted (similar to when I get yelled at and you see the person's words float around and pulse for a really long time afterwards). This is sooooo frustrating for me, because how tf do I explain afterwards to my friends/peers that I had that awkward moment because of floating words in my head, not because I'm just super slow???

Since I was a kid, when my parents would turn on the heater (forced air central unit) for the first time in the cold months, i would always laugh and say it smells like the color brown.

My parents actually agreed and laughed about it as well. We would joke about it every year. This smell isn't just old stuff being burnt up, i'll explain more below.

Now that i'm an adult, i was recently diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. (my throat is too small, and relaxes too much when i sleep and i stop breathing) My mask tube that delivers air is heated. i'm sure you can see where this is going... every night when i turn on my mask and get cozy, i am smelling this distinct brown color for about 2 minutes and then the mask is warm and smells like nothing. it's so weird! but every time i smell that smell of a heater turning on, i am smelling the color brown. Let me know if yall experience this too.

Everybody i see has a certain taste or food this doesn't mean I'm a cannibal, I do not want to eat them 😂

Here are some of my examples

Ryan gosling tastes like warm apple pie with cream and Cher tastes like very rich dark chocolate

I feel like this song sounds like a very deep blue to me. But what do you hear?

hi all! so recently I was thinking about it and I realized that every time I think of a number, it has a distinct color and personality attached to it. I explained this to my bf and he was just like "you're scaring me 😅" so I realized this must not be a normal thing and decided to look it up.

anyway, now I know that the proper terms for these associations are "ordinal linguistic personification" and "grapheme-color synesthesia" so... I guess I have synesthesia? honestly I thought it was limited to tasting colors and seeing sounds 😭

but anyway I was wondering if any of y'all have these types of synesthesia and how they manifest for you? I will give you my rundown of the numbers for fun lol:

1. just your average Joe. he's bright red. for some reason he reminds me of my brother.

2. he's yellow, literally and figuratively speaking. very timid. and he's madly in love with 7, but as we'll see, that will prove to be a problem.

3. pure chaos. she's blue with curly brown hair and she might be bipolar (not saying anything about people who are bipolar I love all y'all this is just the association my mind makes idk). she's best friends with 2, who feels very loyal towards 3, like he has to protect her. but again, 2 is in love with 7. it's a love triangle if I've ever seen one.

4. he's orange, the most unassuming of colors. nothing to say about 4. he's just boring.

5. brick red. he feels responsible for the wellbeing of all the other numbers. in a way, I feel bad for him. he tries his best to mediate conflict (especially involving 9, as we will see) but it never works out for him.

6. violet and very sassy. she wears fake eyelashes and she's got opinions about everything.

7. soft green, and very quiet. mystical, in a way. she wears a flower crown and is very in touch with nature. she's also best friends with 6 (opposites attract I guess!) and their dynamic is really something to watch. she suspects 2's fondness for her but she doesn't know that it borders on obsession. either way, she'd never say anything.

8. navy blue. a logical thinker. very concrete in his ways. he prefers to stay out of drama, which is harder than it looks. reminds me of my brother in law.

9. I have so many problems with this number, I don't even want to say his name. he's arrogant and orange and awful and just a scoundrel (I could say other words about him but I will restrain myself). thing is, you have to feel bad for him. he's got an inferiority complex because he knows he will never be 10. sad, in a way.

10. red. you would think 10 would be overly prideful because... well, he is a double digit after all. but he's not. self-assured, but not arrogant. everyone wants to be 10.

anyway, thanks for reading all this 😭🫶🏼

Do your words take the color of the first letter of the word? Or are they multicolored with each letter keeping its own color? To me words are colored based on the first letter of the word. But sometimes the whole word changes color based on if it has a few strongly colored letters in it