text: Senses. | Almost Amazing Grace.
  in change, creative piece, creative writing, emotions, feel, feelings, happiness, happy, life, look, love, memories, memory, scent, see, senses, smell, touch, writing
  Halloween Jack 22 January 2014 at 23:46
  There's a term for this kind of thing: synaesthesia, where one sense being stimulated causes experiences in another. The most common kind is grapheme-colour synaesthesia, where letters and colours become associated with one another. Ideasthesia is another variation, where concepts and ideas evoke sensations. An example of both is Channel Orange by Frank Ocean. The title comes from a summer in Ocean's life when he first fell in love, and perceived everything to be orange. Hence the colour and the sensation are one and the same. In other cases, like Kanye and Pharrell, they've perceived sound as having a texture, a colour, a weight, a shape. Something tangible that they can see. I think this is chromesthesia.
  The most notable example, at least that I can think of, is Daniel Tammet. An autistic savant, but one capable of fully communicating his experiences with everyone else, Tammet perceives every number up to 10,000 as having its own unique visual image; this actually allows him to do large sums in his head. He envisions the two numbers as these shapes, and the sum of them as a third shape fitting in between them. Tammet also describes having emotional attachments to them, describing pi as beautiful.
  It's more common than you'd think. Languages have very different "shapes" or styles in my head; I perceive French spoken aloud as slender and elegant, I perceive German as stout and robust. Billy Joel, Vladimir Nabokov, Aphex Twin and Nikola Tesla have all experienced it. Exactly what defines a synesthete is debatable, and I don't think there's been a firm scientific ruling, but nothing in life is so simple that it can be easily sorted into an unyielding category. Gender and sexuality are like that. It stands to reason senses are as well.
  Unknown 2 February 2014 at 01:07
  I get it with taste/smell mostly connecting to visuals! When i watch spider man 1 i taste Gillian shell chocolates and when I read Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy I smell sun cream (read it whilst sunbathing in spain like 6 years ago!)