My Experiences With Synesthesia
I have grapheme-color synesthesia, chromesthesia, and spatial sequence synesthesia.
I first became aware that this might not be normal when I was eleven. My sister and I were sitting in our basement listening to the radio, and the song “Larger Than Life” by the Backstreet Boys came on. To me, that song sounds green. Every time I hear it, I see green in my mind’s eye.
So I said to my sister, “Have you ever noticed how sometimes songs sound like certain colors? This song sounds green!”
My sister, who is clearly not a synesthete, said no, and looked at me like I was nuts. That was the end of our conversation.
Later, I think this was when I was maybe in my early twenties, I read on the Internet that hearing music as colors, and seeing letters and numbers as colors (I do that too), is a symptom of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia runs on both sides of my family, and I’ve long been concerned that I have it, so I took this as confirmation that I do have it, that there is something fundamentally wrong with me, and that I am on the verge of a complete psychotic break and there’s nothing I can do about it. And I spent about a decade going around with that thought in my head.
More recently, like in the past few years, it seems like synesthesia has been having a bit of a moment in the mainstream media, with celebrities (mostly singers and musicians such as Lorde, Patrick Stump, Lady Gaga, etc.), talking publicly about their experiences with synesthesia.
Apparently there are a lot of normal people, and even highly successful people, just going around hearing music as colors. It’s very common in professional musicians. People who weren’t told that this is a symptom of schizophrenia actually seem to be rather proud of it.
I’m still concerned that I might be about to have a complete psychotic break, of course, but apparently the synesthesia in and of itself isn’t a symptom of anything, so I guess that’s a relief?
Originally published at http://adventureandintrospection.wordpress.com on August 5, 2023.
