Synesthesia: ANNOYING.

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Specifically, my old monitor (Flatscreen I've used for the past 5-6 years) burned out yesterday, and I temporarily replaced it with an older-but-still-functional CRT I borrowed from my brother-in-law.

However, this is the problem: The forum colors now taste wrong. I mean, it was mildly distracting that the green tasted like Mountain Dew and the blue tasted kind of berryish. But now the blue tastes like a kind of mint-like flavor that clashes with the citrusesque green flavor that is not Mt. Dew.

Now it's really distracting.

That has to be a lot to handle. You might just have to get a new monitor.

How exactly does synasthesia work, I wonder? (I know, I know, read about it). But still.

It crosses over sensory impressions. Like, for me, colors have flavors. Also, music has colors.

It's not really a lot to handle, just distracting. When I was younger, some colors would actually make me nauseous from the taste.

Pleh. That does sound annoying. On the other hand, you could use it to your benefit, if you filled your environment with colors that tasted good.

Did you try changing the Colour Temperature/ Brightness/ Contrast of your screen?
Maybe you can adjust it to be less distracting.

CRT monitors give a better picture quality that most LCD, it's possible that you now "taste" WP real colors. Did you adjust the monitor balance of colors? You may try that.

Quite true - I've done that to a small extent but never really planned it out.



I've been doing this on and off all day. It's an old monitor and somewhat dim - I had to push the brightness/contrast up to be able to read some of the webpages I like to follow.



I haven't done anything with the balance of colors. I'll give it a try.

I wish that WP tasted like Mountain Dew for me...I could cut down on my serious addiction!

That said, I don't mean to belittle your current situation. While it seems like Synesthesia could be fun at times, the sudden change of 'flavors' would drive me crazy!

Haha, I like the taste, although experiencing it constantly is a bit distracting.



Yes, exactly.

Unpleasant scents as a result of synaesthesia is rather annoying. Fortunately my taste synaesthesia isn't as strong. It's tied to the memory of food.

Do computer monitors have a black and white option?

I do not know if they can do black and white in that particular way, but that makes me wonder if there's any monochrome plugins for Firefox.

How do you manage this color-taste synesthesia leaving your house?
Two years ago I watched a documentary about a man with a strong color-taste synesthesia and his wife painted the kitchen blue, but it made him feel ill each time he was entering the kitchen and she hang up curtains which did not get along with the taste of the blue and made it worse for the man.
I have a color-sound and color-letter synesthesia and I feel like I perceive sound very tactile, which can also only be due to auditory overload, but when I hear ie a car approaching, I "feel" like a "rolling-tornado-on-the-side-like"-form (in a certain color) approaching and my body reacts with a lot of stress.
I also have visual processing issues leading to overload, which prevents me from leaving my home most, I guess.
When I was a child we had family living close to a factory making chocolate and jam and other things containing sugar and each time I had to pass there I got ill only from the smell and taste in the air, and I dislike sugar because it makes me ill and my skin hurts and it causes some "weird" feeling in my brain.
Are there tastes which make you feel ill?
How do you manage in an enviroment with many different colors?
Is it additional causing sensory overload?

I don't think it's as strong for me as it is for the man in that documentary, although it is fairly present. I always thought it was normal to "associate taste with color" because I've always done so. I tend to focus on specific things - if I'm in a vehicle, I usually read a book or zone out. If I'm going for a walk I tend to focus on things like trees or specific automobiles or houses.



That's sounds pretty overloading.



There are colors that cause tastes that make me feel ill. One I remember from early childhood was this shade of brown that, I guess the best way to describe it would be like a vinyl cupcake. It was only one object that prompted that, and for some reason I kept stumbling across it in the house and car.

Several years later - in middle school - there was a shade of yellow/green that tasted awful and made me feel nauseous every time I saw it.

It can contribute to sensory overload, and is one of the issues I have with video games, although most video game colors are fairly palatable - although the first Diablo game had monsters of the same color that made me ill. I don't think Diablo II reused that color, though. In City of Heroes, I made a fire-based hero with blue fire (I like most shades of blue, flavor-wise), but the blue flavor clashed with the orange glow from her superspeed, leaving an awful taste.

I tend to focus on a few colors when there are too many. It can get a bit strange with a lot of them at once, and not generally very pleasant.

One thing I find interesting is that some colors have flavors I can't easily describe or pin down. I am not sure I've ever eaten anything that tasted like that. There's a different yellowish shade of green that is sort of like really spicy citrus, but not specifically lemon, lime, orange, or grapefruit. And the spicy part is a bit confusing as well.

That's a very unique and fascinating type of synesthesia, Verdandi, although the problems associated with it sound horrible. You should consider being in a study about synesthesia, if you haven't already. You don't hear about color-taste synesthetes much, just grapheme-color synesthetes. I think it's really neat how your taste sensations often are tastes of foods that are that color (like citrus for yellow-green). That's really cool. And yes, for whatever reason, some synesthetic experiences are never experienced in the real world. I've heard about lots of synesthetes who experience colors that don't actually exist in the real world.

That colors seem to match up with several of the tastes made me doubt whether it is synesthesia, but I found out that kind of correlation is not necessarily unusual.

The emoticons here have a shade of yellow that prompts another flavor that I've never encountered in life. It's sort of a meat-like flavor, but not precisely. It's not a bad taste at all, just something I am not sure anything actually really tastes like.

Also, re: studies. That's an interesting idea. There's a site with a synesthesia test that I've never been able to sit all the way through. I tried a few times as far back as 2008 (although at the time I was seriously unsure whether I had synesthesia, and then dismissed the idea for some reason).