#projective 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??

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.

I think I understand what you're saying. I'll try and make my answer as clear as possible, but when describing "seeing" in terms of synesthesia, it does get difficult to distinguish between what one sees physically, versus what one sees in their mind's eye.

With projective synesthesia, a grapheme-color synesthete would physically see the colors that they associate with symbols (I'll just use letters as my example). This means that it isn't just in their mind's eye - when they look at letters, they see the colors of those letters in real life.

With associative synesthesia, a grapheme-color synesthete would either see the colors in their mind's eye, or merely know that they associate colors with certain letters. So they wouldn't actually see colors anywhere beyond their imagination / consciousness; and some would not 'see' the colors anywhere, yet they would have an instinctive knowledge that, say, 'E' is yellow, because it just feels that way.

Since this is my first synesthesia post, I figured I should start off with talking about some misconceptions about synesthesia that I frequently run into. I can understand the reasoning behind believing most of these (I used to believe a few of them myself before really getting into researching synesthesia), so I wanted to clarify them.

Hi all! I have two announcements I'd like to make. First, I'm in the process of relocating my old synesthesia simulation videos to a new channel. I made 13 of these from 2017-2022 and posted them on my main music channel, which harmed both their performance and the rest of my music's reach. These videos were made with After Effects and the Trapcode suite, which I no longer use because of Adobe's predatory terms of service and the disconnect between actual synesthetic qualia and what I'm capable of rendering in a 2.5D format.

To this day, the tools available to depict my experiences with are insufficient. Which brings me to my second announcement:

I am in the process of creating a real-time competitive synesthesia simulator for VR that will enable you to see, feel, and touch music; as well as craft your own song experiences (for those of you who can see music yourself). I've been working with another developer on this and we've made good progress already! The simulator will be paired with a study that will evaluate players on their experiences in hopes of answering questions I've been wanting answered for years. I have a hypothesis about what might come about because of this simulator, but still no solid research to back it up. I'm not sure if it will be possible to get this study published in a journal as someone with no degree, but I will be collaborating with researchers to formulate the study in a way that is empirically sound. At the moment, I'm seeking funding through Unreal Megagrants to get it produced within ~1-2 years. If that is a dead end, we may do a Kickstarter instead.

If this interests you, please subscribe to my channel on YouTube and ring the bell there so you don't miss news on this. Some time after all the old simulations have been uploaded, I'll be posting previews of the current prototype, as well as prototypical song simulations created with it.

Until then, you can watch one of the first synesthesia simulations I made back in 2017 on my new channel here: