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omg, Top Gear interviewed a synaesthete! (Check out the sceptical comments. Does this mean I belong to another oppressed minority? w00t!)

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The commenters on YouTube are idiots. One of the things that made me confident the guest was legit and not just making things up was that his comments on the taste of the various shapes and details on the cars correspond very much to the studies that have been done so far on taste synaesthesia -- the tastes he described were all things that he could/would have tasted in childhood such as pear drops, Marmite and rice pudding, as opposed to more refined "adult" tastes like wine, blue cheese or lobster, which are rarely encountered among taste synaesthetes.

Thanks for the link -- I really enjoyed watching it!

Oh, good point about the childhood flavours! It's been ages since I read anything on taste synaesthesia.

May I ask what is the nature of your synasthesia? (And I'll note I've never read an ane YouTube comment.)

ane! LOL

My synaesthesia is chromolexical, which is the greatest word ever - I associate numbers and letters with colours. I also "see" moving shapes and colours when I listen to music. These are the commonest kinds IIUC.

I also "see" moving shapes and colours when I listen to music.

Me too! It makes cycling while having music on a little distracting sometimes.

You're a chromolexical synaesthete? That sounds wonderfully deviant and decadent!

More seriously, I wish I could borrow your sensorium for a day.

(delete/repasted to correct spelling.) Again.

You, too?

I see sounds as line traces, especially when listening to music.

I forget the exact figure, but something like 10% of the population is synaesthetic, with our MTV version being one of the most common. :-)

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It can be very distracting - imagine sitting in a briefing and paying attention to not a word that was said because the discussion looks like an EEG trace.

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While the patterns are pretty, they don't convey a whole lot of information, so it's far more likely that you'll walk out of the meeting knowing less than you did when you walked in.

That your boyfriend only reads technical books is lamentable. There are so many interesting things out there, and most of them aren't as dry as a lot of tech manuals.

I really don't recommend that technique, or any brain injury, for that matter. The drawbacks far outweigh the odd and interesting things that may come about as a result.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/youtube.png

TRUFAX

How interesting! I think to some May might have seemed a little patronising in this piece, but I think he was more a bit bemused by the specific flavour-to-car-aspect relationships.

I don't know what the commenters there are thinking (certainly a lot of them aren't saying anything complementary), but there are people out there who wouldn't believe him if he said, 'I look at that green car and it makes me think of the colour of grass.'

I have no idea if this a tiny symptom of synaethesia, but I have quite firmly believed, for as long as I can remember, that 7, 4, and 2 are female, and 9, 8, 6, 5, 3, and 1 are male. They just are. No reason for why, no memorable formative events in my childhood that would explain it. It sounds like a really mild form of ordinal linguistic personification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_linguistic_personification), maybe.

How *(&^)*% cool is that?!

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