Synesthesia - is a weird scientific term I first heard two years ago. In regard to our 5 senses - it is the odd instance where the sense of sound/ hearing somehow triggers a taste response in addition. It is almost like a short circuit of your senses where an external response, a word or even a sound, unleashes a natural response and you notice a quick reflex of taste in your mouth. Sometimes it is merely a thought of a certain taste in your brain. Nonetheless, it is a scientific phenomenon where a stimulus triggers the wrong sense in your brain.
I bring this post up right now for two reasons. I know I do not exhibit Synesthesia, but my morning coffee has recently been tasting like soap. Possibly in the same way some people get that response from cilantro. Something is misfiring. It could be that my Keurig needs a good vinegar rinse. Or maybe our dish soap is extremely pervasive.
A second thought on my brain are the concepts of current drum corps shows this summer. Totally Disconnected. But the marching community loves to come up with bizarre concepts based on a weird word association, so they create these non-words, that are supposed to create some magical response just like the Synthesia noted above. However, it is usually lost on the other 99% of the population that remains perplexed at said concept. For example this year we have In Absintheia, symbio.sys, Exogenesis and others. In drum corps, sometimes there is an aesthetic approach to a show design instead of something either logical or emotional. In these cases, there is also the risk that they are so far off base that the audiences are not in on the gig. It becomes a Master's Thesis project the staffs are left pandering to the judges in hopes of being rewarded. You can guess how I feel about most of these designs.
But back to the concept at hand. Synesthesia affects a mere percentage of the population and is hardly a quantifiable science. It comes in countless forms. It can arise from hearing words that trigger a taste. It can come from a word/ taste association going back to your childhood. (Much like a certain song can trigger a time sensitive memory from your past.) Some people state it doesn't come as a taste, but a feeling of a texture in your mouth. This one seems hard for me to fathom. Others maintain it is not words, but specific sounds from the environment that bring it on. Some of us might remember that when we were young and forced to eat a food we did not like. if you plugged your nose while chewing, supposedly it diminished the taste in your mouth. I do not doubt that all our main senses are somehow correlated. I also have always wondered about vision - if what I see is blue is the same color sensation as you would see it.
The scientific reality is that the taste buds on the tip of our tongue are highly sensitive and organized into different groups of sweet, bitter, acid et al. And with all the circuitry of our neurology, it is easy to see how misfiring could happen in 1% of the population. All of this means absolutely nothing in the big picture. It is just one of those thoughts that popped up in my mind again today, Inquiring Minds Want to Know.
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