I think I have lexical gustatory synesthesia

Jase Clamp
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read

When I was a kid I used to watch cooking shows. I don’t know it was just my thing. But this one show they were cooking up brain. I remember it effected me deeply. It took me months to get over the sick feeling it gave me every time the image would come back to my… brain.

Recently there’s been a strange spate of gross things coming across my feed. Like many out there, I use Feedly to read updates from various blogs and include the standards in my roll like Mashable, The Verve, Gizmodo. Here’s a few articles that have come through lately:

  • One about people wanting to drink red juice from a sarcophagus
  • People found the oldest wheel of cheese in a pyramid or something and wanted to put it on a sandwich (which due to bacteria would kill you)
  • And then… scientist found the oldest intact foal in permafrost — it still had hair. So hey lets put that on a sandwich too.

Of course when writers at these blogs do these articles they put an image at the top. The sarcophagus one was terribly gnarly. I don’t know how that was allowed. It popped up a few time in my feed over a period of weeks and each time I’d quickly scan past it but it would affect me so badly — I’d be messed up for the entire morning. It would literally ruin my coffee, breakfast, etc.. Horrible taste in my mouth, feeling sick in my stomach etc.

Now I know plenty of my friends read these blogs too because regularly the topics will come up in conversation. But I didn’t hear any chatter about this “grossness” coming back to me. It made me wonder if maybe my reaction is more extreme than other peoples. Maybe the editors at these blogs didn’t see a problem with this imagery.

So I started Googling. Apparently some people have this condition called synesthesia. Its sort of like where you get stimulus in the form of seeing or hearing something and it will trigger an associated sensation. For example hearing something might make you think a colour or hearing certain words might trigger a taste. In the past psychologists chalked this up to an overactive imagination. Now they reckon that 1 in 1000 people legitimately have something like this. I think I have a mild version of the taste one because I’ve spoken to people about this and it’s no way as extreme for them.

Perhaps it’s why to this day I have a subconscious aversion to companies with “brain” in the name. When you perceive the world you just assume everyone else’s experience is the same.

Anyway, I think those writers over at Mashable et al should be aware of people like us and how you’re impacting us. You don’t have to put the picture of the thing directly in the headline, use a bit of tact and creativity.

Jase Clamp

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