Hi!! Do you know anything about colour synaesthesia! (or synaesthesia in general) I'm writing a character with it and I recently saw that people with autism can experience it? I've also heard people with psychosis can experience it! I've done a lot of googling and I haven't really found anything concrete on it and what it can be a symptom of and synaesthesia in general Thank you!
Answers courtesy the Scriptshrink consultants!
With synaesthesia there is a link between different senses, so a stimulus is experiences in an unusual way. If your character has colour synaesthesia, consider which senses are linked to the colours. For example:
Robert sees letters in different colours. A is crimson red, B is tangerine, et cetera.
Momoko insists that Sunday is aquamarine.
Shouq can describe the shape and colour of each of her friends.
Elijah loves it when the grandfather clock chimes because the colours shift between oranges and reds.
Your character might experience synaesthesia in only one area, or in multiple areas.I suggest one of the first things to think about with your character is whether they projective or associative synaesthesia. If they have projective synaesthesia they will actually see colours when they hear certain sounds. If they have associative synaesthesia they will not see the colour in their field of vision, but might describe their best friend’s voice as being “cherry red”.
Your character may or may not realise that their way of perceiving the world is unusual. I have associative synaesthesia between tastes and shapes/colours. To me, flavours have different shapes and colours. However, I did not realise that that was unusual until very recently – I was cooking a meal for a friend and asked what spices she had because I needed to add a spiky orange flavour. It was frustrating when she didn’t understand what I meant. Later, I asked what round brown sauces she had so that I could add a little one of the side dishes. Her response was “well, I’ve got some HP at the back of the cupboard, but that’s the only brown sauce I have”. I clarified that I wanted a sauce whose flavour was round and brown, but she didn’t know what I meant then either.To me it was completely obvious that flavours have different shapes and colours. Ketchup is tall and spiky, in the same way that miso is a wide, shallow arc – they just are. Although I know that flavours don’t literally have these colours and shapes, to me those are undisputedly the colour that they are. It’s the same way that most people would describe Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT7_IZPHHb0 ) as “sad” – it’s just a bunch of notes strung together, but it still makes you feel an emotion. To have someone not understand what I meant when I described a flavour using shapes and colours was like someone not being able to understand me describing a song as sad. “It’s a taste, so how can it be a colour?” is the same as “it’s just sounds, so how can it be an emotion?”
Although I am autistic, you don’t need to have autism to experience synaesthesia. Interestingly, there was a study published recently about the potential link between autism and synaesthesia - http://www.sussex.ac.uk/newsandevents/index?id=39479
You don’t need to have psychosis or autism to have synesthesia. I experience grapheme-color synesthesia and I don’t know that there’s any correlation to that and mental illness. It’s just a unique way of looking at things.
Letters have certain colors in my head. People have certain colors. One of my characters is dark blue. I just think of blue when I think of him and it’s due simply to the fact that his eyes are blue. The name of an album is red because the cover is red. Your senses are somewhat crossed anyway - lose your sense of smell, and your sense of taste significantly diminishes. It’s just associating things with other things. It’s deeper thinking, a deeper perspective.
Color and visual synesthesia is rare for me, but I get it where sound has a feeling pretty much daily, the road noise of some asphalt makes my teeth hurt. The texture and look of pressed board clipboards is nails on a chalkboard. But I can also sometimes get color to sounds/music, and other color associations, but they are faint and I don’t really pay attention to them because they just, feel normal to me. Like, if my mother is a soft lavender then that’s just part of who she is like having brown hair, it’s background information to me. But the first two things, those are jarring so it’s hard to ignore them.
Followers with synesthesia, do you have anything to add?
