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Synesthesia

Not sure if this has already been done, but I just mentioned it in another thread and it may be worthy of its own. Or it may be a single post that disappears quickly :)

Synesthesia is (in simple terms) the phenomenon of a sensory input triggering another unrelated sense. It's fairly common to read of people 'seeing' specific musical notes as distinct colours, for example, or people who see letters as inherently coloured (the wiki article is a decent read).

Have you ever experienced this with a fragrance? The one I posted about earlier is Geoffrey Beene's much maligned Grey Flannel - when it settles down to the clean and pure violet which sees the fragrance out, I can distinctly 'hear' that violet as a high and pure tone, completely unchanging, the sort of tone that used to be broadcast when a channel went off the air. It doesn't happen to me with anything else, just this one fragrance, and it's always the same high note (it's an E, for any reading musicians, but I haven't yet remembered to sit at a keyboard and find out which octave, certainly at least 3 above middle C though).

I wouldn't be surprised to hear stories of taste linked to fragrance, of course, and I guess to some extent we all do this when we think of a fragrance as 'green' or 'blue' or 'purple' but does it ever go further than this for you? Do you SEE those colours when you smell the fragrance rather than just associate them? Does a fragrance ever trigger an unexpected and actual sensory response anywhere other than your nose?


This post first appeared on Grant Osborne, please read the originial post: here

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Synesthesia

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