Well, Synaesthesia is best described as a criss-crossing of the senses. It comes from the Greek for "joined perception". There are four main types. Gustav Synaesthesia - where taste translates into colour. Coloured hearing Synaesthesia - where sound is experienced in shape and colour. Audio tactile Synaesthesia - where you feel sound. That’s me, and Grapheme Colour Synaesthesia – where numbers and letters are experienced in colour, that’s me too. It is involuntary, and experienced, not imagined.
There are several theories. My favourite is the idea that as babies, all our senses are mixed up and as we grow in childhood our senses separate and solidify. In Synaesthetes, these senses don’t separate and the neural pathways stay open. Which is why Syneasthetes can appear child like and emotional because we still view the world with playful curiosity and wonderment.
Having Synaesthesia means I have a super heightened sensual awareness. I feel colour. I taste colour. I read the world through a riot of colours and patterns. I feel texture in music and hear visual stories in my head like a film, with sounds and tastes overlapping - all this taken in an instant 4D download VoOm. Plain foods, like coffee dates Sashimi are like a Heston Blumenthal experience eh Mouthgasm!
One of brother the Automotive Designer says my Brain works a bit like a Google search. You type something in the search box, auto suggestions links to what it might be or related to and it gives you the 1st page of results. My brain works like that, except, 5 pages of the result all at the same time with everything and anything possibly related to it, in my experience.
He said that my brain has 3 visual hard drives memories, like 30 Terrabytes, running with 2Gb of ram but with modern processors so what happens is, my brain links up and goes to each harddrive at light speed but with only 2GB of ram, there’s only so much memory I can use at a time. "