26 February 2013

Four lexical gustatory examples

For anyone new to this blog or who doesn't know, I have two mild forms of synesthesia: sound color (I see colors when I hear certain sounds, notes or songs) and lexical gustatory (tasting certain things, or craving tastes, when I hear certain sounds or words) - I'm going to abbreviate this LG for now. The latter is much more fun, but as I said, they're both mild and don't surface that often. Well! Yesterday, I discovered a new LG synesthesia cue for me: the word "stickers" makes me taste and/or crave gummy candy. Neither the pearly kind nor the sour kind - the classic, transparent/jelly kind. I excitedly tweeted this, got into a mini conversation with Mikey Il about it, and then realized that sharing four of my lexical gustatory cues with you guys might be fun.

Lexical gustatory synesthesia

Media channel is celery. This one came up between 2 and 5 years ago. I'm thinking it was when I was still at Naked NY, since the nature of our work had us talking about media channels all the time. This is a very refreshing, crunchy pair of words for me.

Stickers is gummy candy. I have of course heard the word before, but for some reason when I read it out loud from an email yesterday, I flung up in my seat, ran to the kitchen, and ate a bunch of gummy Vitamin Cs and ginger chews. Every time I've uttered or heard the word since (I've been saying it a lot), I have the same sensation, taste, or craving.

Check is Doritos. Well, sort of. This one is fairly old, and I first remember it happening in middle school some time. It's not only the word check, but most words with a hard "ch" sound, and an "E" somewhere in the word. But the E has to be pronounceable. It can either be a short E, like in checkers, check, or Chester, or a long E, like in cheese, cheat, or cheek. Soft "ch" words don't count ("chenille" doesn't do anything for me in an LG way, for example, other than picturing a pile of cooked, blue-tinted glass noodles, but I'm not sure what that means either!? That literally just happened.).

Couch is my first LG cue ever, when I was about five years old. It happened while listening to a Teddy Ruxpin tape. There was one story where he and Grubby, and maybe some other characters were exploring the inside of a couch, and it was this big adventure. Every time Teddy Ruxpin said couch, I got this desire to eat something. But I couldn't figure out what, for years and years. Almost 20 years later, on the way to White Plains for a client meeting, a team I was on stopped to pick up lunch. The second I bit into my first-ever potato empanada, I yelled out loud, "OH MY GOD, IT'S COUCH!" I didn't realize this was due to a form of synesthesia yet, so it was a little awkward explaining what the hell I meant by my outburst.

Fun? Should I do more of these? Do any of you guys have any forms of synesthesia? Please tell me. I've never met or spoken to one before.

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