#characters with synesthesia

1) Trying to describe things by relating them to their synesthetic experience

This is similar to the bilingual problem where you can only think of the word in the foreign language (from the other person’s perspective). For example, I once got several strange looks from my friends for trying to describe this man’s voice as the “yellow-y texture of somewhat fine sandpaper”

2) Messing up tests because they were confused by their synesthesia

Okay that didn’t really make a ton of sense, but I’ll do my best to explain it. Synesthetes (people with synesthesia) will sometimes associate things that have the same arbetrary color/smell/texture assigned to them. For example, I’ve messed up on tests because the letters F, T, and the number 5 are all the exact same shade of forest green. And then there’s explaining to my bewildered teacher why I accedentally subsituted the variable T with the number 5 and came up with the completely wrong answer.

3) Remembering someone’s name from a decade ago when they’ve not talked to them in that same amount of time and they weren’t exactly influencial

Like point #2, synesthesia can mess with memory. It might take a little while to attach faces to names, but after that, sometimes names will stick absurdly well because “oh yeah I remember that kid’s face - he was the one with the muddy purple name - oh, that was marco!”

4) Explaining for the thousandth time that synesthesia is the ASSOCIATION of two otherwise unrelated senses (most commonly known is colors and words or colors and letters), NOT literally seeing the color float through your vision

This can get a little frustrating, but giving your character a go-to way of describing it can be fun. Mine is “keep your eyes open and imagine the color blue. Can you tell what the exact shade is? Probably. Is it literally floating through your vision? No. Synesthesia is the same except the colors are arbetrary (though consistant), but they occupy the same mental space as the blue you just came up with.”