#associative synesthesia

Does it effect each of you in a different way? Like, do you all get something different from it, and do some experience it in a lessened degree or higher degree than others??

i have associative grapheme-color synesthesia + ordinal linguistic personification + spacial sequence synesthesia.

let me break that down

synesthesia - "Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway"(Wikipedia). basically, one sense triggers the sensation or association of another sense.

associative synesthesia - this is the more common kind of synesthesia. as opposed to projected synesthesia, those who experience associative synesthesia do not literally feel/see/experience this phenomenon physically. rather, there is a strong involuntary association between two senses. while someone with projected synesthesia might physically See the colors associated with a sound, someone with associative synesthesia will see it only in the minds eye.

grapheme-color synesthesia - this is the most prevalent/researched kind of synesthesia. someone with grapheme-color synesthesia has a natural association of letters, numbers, words, and even shapes to colors. for example: the letter A is yellow, the number 1 is blue, the word synesthesia is pink, and circles are red. (this is only my experience though. every synesthete is different)

ordinal linguistic personification - this co occurs with many types of synesthesia but is most commonly found in synesthetes with grapheme-color synesthesia. ordinal linguistic personification is when a synesthete percieves letters, numbers, words, days of the week, months, ect as having specific genders, personality traits, and even relationships with eachother. for example: five is red, she is an aries. stubborn, loud, confident, funny. she is friends with six who is purple and a libra. she is fair, shy, sweet, easygoing.

spacial sequence synesthesia - this can also be called visio-spacial synesthesia. those who experience it percieve sequences like letters, numbers, months, days of the week, ect. as occupying points in space. for me, because its associative, i see these things in my minds eye but those with projected synesthesia may see these things in the actual space around them. for example, the way i see months is they are in a circle around my head. all of them color coded of course. i can spin the circle around in my minds eye to move whatever month im focusing on towards the front of my head. so when january (blue) is in the front, august (orange) would be at the back of my head. gosh i hope that makes sense.

so basically

the letter T is green. he is a boy and is sort of a loner and he exists on a horizontal slider with all the other letters in standard alphabetical order.

************************************************

(i tried to make some of the words the color that they are in my brain but there arent too many color options so those colors are only as close as i could get to their Actual Colors)

Okay, this confuses the stuffing out of people sometimes (at least, it used to for me), so I decided to write a post on it.

There are two umbrellas that someone’s synesthesia can fall under: projective and associative.

Projective synesthesia is likely the first kind you’ll hear of when you stumble across the topic of synesthesia. This is where your pairings are projected outward into your peripheral vision. Someone with grapheme-color synesthesia (projective) would see words/letters/numbers/etc. in their “proper” colors. For example, if they saw the word “kite” as purple, the word “kite” would literally appear to be purple, even though it may be written in black text. For someone with ticker tape synesthesia (projective), they literally see “subtitles” in their peripheral vision spelling out everything that someone is saying. These subtitles can be located anywhere in their peripheral vision. Someone with lexical gustatory synesthesia (projective), which is sight to taste, will literally taste the words/numbers/letters they see/hear. 

Associative synesthesia is where you see your pairings only in your mind, rather than in your peripheral vision. You know how when you remember something--an event, a person, etc.--and you see it in your mind, but not in the world around you? That’s the same place that associative synesthetes see their pairings. For lack of a better term, I call this the mental realm. I believe I’m the only one that really uses that term to describe it, but I could be wrong. Regardless, people with associative synesthesia see their pairings in their mental realm or have a very strong association between two things. For someone with lexical-gustatory synesthesia (associative), the letter Y may very obviously taste like watermelon without them physically tasting watermelon. For those with chromesthesia/sound-color synesthesia, perhaps “Love Song” by Sara Bareilles is clearly blue and brown (which they see in their mental realm).

Every single type of synesthesia (as far as I know) has the capability of being either projective or associative in a synesthete. Associative synesthesia is every bit as legitimate as projective synesthesia, but tends to be a bit harder to discover since it’s more subtle.