Quotes & Sayings About Synesthesia

Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn't been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn't induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn't produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn't just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he'd get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing. — Lisa Ko

A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned. — David Mitchell

The spring came suddenly; the rains stopped, the days grew noticeably longer, and the afternoon light felt powdery, as if it might blow away. — Jane Mendelsohn

Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head. — Leni Zumas

Mori made an unwilling sound. 'I don't like Western art.'

'No look at this.' He lifted it from its package. It wasn't heavy. 'It's clever, it looks like busy Mozart.'

'What?'

'I . . .' Thaniel sighed. 'I see sound. Mozart looks like this. You know. Fast strings.'

'See? In front of you?'

'Yes. I'm not mad.'

'I didn't think so. All sounds?'

'Yes. — Natasha Pulley

Deep spirit scanning," Eisfanger says. His voice has a strange resonance to it, like I'm hearing him through a bad phone connection. "Don't worry, it's completely safe. Well, mostly."
"Mostly?"
"Side effects have been documented," he admits. "In a very small percentage of cases. Less than two percent."
"What kind of side effects?" Suddenly I'm feeling nauseous. Feels like the ants are crawling around inside me now, which is exactly as disturbing as it sounds.
"Memory loss. Synesthesia. And occasionally ... vestigial growths."
"So I could forget my own name, start smelling purple everywhere and have an extra nipple sprout from my forehead? — D.D. Barant

Most folks got Id and Ego living on different floors in their head's house, in different rooms, and they've locked all the doors between them, and nailed sheets of plywood over that, because they think they're, like, sworn enemies that can't hang together.
Ro thought the whole subconscious/conscious issue had something to do with why I am the way I am. She said I have the neurological condition synesthesia out the ass, with all kinds of cross regions of my brain talking to each other. Old witch was always psychoanalyzing me (as in she was the psycho and I was being analyzed). She said my Id and Ego are best buds, they don't just live on the same floor, they share a bed.
I'm cool with that. Frees up space for other stuff.
I take off, tune out, and do what I do best.
Kill. — Karen Marie Moning

There is a strong link between synesthesia and photographic memory (technically called eidetic memory) or at least heightened memory (hypermnesis). Many synesthetes used their synesthesia as a mnemonic aid. — Richard E. Cytowic

Let's zoom in on a particular form of synesthesia as an example. For most of us, February and Wednesday do not have any particular place in space. But some synesthetes experience precise locations in relation to their bodies for numbers, time units, and other concepts involving sequence or ordinality. They can point to the spot where the number 32 is, where December floats, or where the year 1966 lies.8 These objectified three-dimensional sequences are commonly called number forms, although more precisely the phenomenon is called spatial sequence synesthesia.9 The most common types of spatial sequence synesthesia involve days of the week, months of the year, the counting integers, or years grouped by decade. In addition to these common types, researchers have encountered spatial configurations for shoe and clothing sizes, baseball statistics, historical eras, salaries, TV channels, temperature, and more. — David Eagleman

In one of the strangest types of synesthesia - there are at least three dozen - people see a word and immediately experience a taste on their tongue. — John Medina

The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering-the long and the slow kind-has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of profoundly felt convalescence. — Fernando Pessoa

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another. — James Geary

Of having forgotten the colour of loves and the taste of hatreds. We thought we were immortal. — Fernando Pessoa

I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It's as if I'm standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float as a gauzy sheet stretching over to the left. I also see people, architecture and events laid out chronologically in the columns. When I think of the year 1805, I see Trafalgar, women in the clothes of that era, famous people who lived then, the building, etc. The sixth to tenth centuries are very green, the Middle Ages are dark with vibrant splashes of red and blue and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are brown with rich, lush colours in the furniture and clothing. — Claudia Hammond

I was 13 years old at music school talking to my teacher. I can't quite remember what it was I was trying to describe, but I do remember my music teacher saying to me, 'Do you have synesthesia?' In hindsight, it seems a little presumptuous of her to think a little boy in Essex would know what synesthesia was. — Dev Hynes

The most evocative life memories, which produced a synesthesia of emotions, consist of a host of small pleasures intertwined with the homespun stitches of love, affection, kindness, humility, and appreciation of nature. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders. — Leni Zumas

My synesthesia is mostly gone - it was a much bigger factor when I was a kid. But having no depth perception is a bonus when you're trying to lay out flat images and describe them to an artist - flat is all I see. — G. Willow Wilson

Rama's experiments suggest that some metaphors can be understood as mild forms of synesthesia. In — Jaron Lanier

You should quit. Cigarettes make people taste ... yellow.
Taste? Kizzy's mind did a cartwheel. Taste? Was this Jack Husk thinking about tasting her? Great God Almighty, she did not want to taste yellow if that happened, whatever yellow tasted like. — Laini Taylor