That is really cool/weird.

Good band too. Synæstheia is a side project of Front Line Assembly, aka. Delerium.
btw, I totally get the "medical" term of it too. I find I can phase in and out of it at times. Makes for some really great perspective, though occasionally hard to deal with when trying to explain to someone why something does or doesn't "work", be it art or music.

Example: I had to go over to a friend's place. I didn't want to go because it wasn't the place for me to be (her parents weren't my biggest fan, as I wasn't what they'd really wanted for their daughter...). Coming up the driveway, I realised that my initial fears were correct: the edges of the house were too sharp. The back of the house was lit up, as they were facing a forest, and the edges were too black and sharp (sharp and vicious: read as 'waiting blades') and the area around that was too yellow. Wasp. Trap. I was convinced that if I were to touch the edge of the house, I'd come away bleeding. Now, trying to explain that things are good or bad because the edges or the colours are violently wrong is a hard thing to do, so I cover that with words that people can relate to.

wow Z_R that's actually pretty cool. i can somewhat relate in having odd feelings around certain locales but none so vivid. something that intense would likely have given me the screaming heebie-jeebies.

I saw someone interviewed about this once. Sounds had taste to him. He was talking about how he had to break up with a really cute girl he really liked because he just couldn't stand the taste of her voice.

It would be like if everytime someone spoke I got the flavor of liver... yuck.

I know at least one Metachat member who has synaesthesia.

I find synaesthesia utterly fascinating. Wasn't there a thread in here a while ago where someone asked what people's personal/internal calendars looked like? Many folk responded describing layouts & colours that just seem to mentally be *there*.

Number & letter/colour synasthesia representing.

I sometimes get cortex and cmonkey mixed up because when I'm skimming Mefi both their names are yellow.

Ya see, "c" is yellow: bright, buttercup yellow (and don't try to convince me differently. I have regular bickering matches with a close friend who has the same form of synasthesia but a whole raft of different colours). But "r", "t" and "x" are quieter colours-- soft blue/silver, metallic silver, and white/transparent. They don't counter the yellow very strongly. So "cortex" is pretty much straight yellow. "cmonkey" has a whole wack of yellow in there with the "c", and the "e" which is pale yellow, and the "k", which is a deeper yellow, like the inside part of a daffodil, and the "y", which is similar to the "c" yellow but a degree darker. So "cmonkey" ends up being primarily yellow too, despite the strength of the "m" (powder blue) and the "n" (dark blue).

So you see how easy it is to confuse the names.

It's not weird, honest. Until I was 34 I thought everybody had it.

Zack_Replica, your house anecdote makes perfect sense to me. As I've grown older I've tried to learn to suppress those reactions a little bit, because they became too intrusive.

ooh, ooh! What color am I?

Oh, a bit late, but I can tell you your name colour taz: it's subtle. "t" has a silver quality, but shiny and almost chromey, unlike "r" where the silver is like pencil shading. "a" is red, and "z" is white, but the combination of all the letters makes your name a much softer thing overall than one would think from listing silver/red/white. For a start, there's a blue underlay to the "t" just as there is in "r". So actually the colour of your name is so to speak greater than the parts of the whole, and comes out mostly silver and muted overall from the white of the "z".

I just realized that written out like that it looks kind of insane.