Synesthesia and the Beer Spectrum

I have a condition called synesthesia. That means that my senses are more or less linked to each other in my mind. Different people get it differently. For me, it is mostly sounds, smells and tastes that get "translated" to shapes and colours in my mind. I can say that a scented soap "looks purple, but smells yellow", and that makes perfect sense to me. The smell gives me a mental image of "yellow".

I like beer, and trying out different kinds of beer. Beer tastes multicoloured. Almost all beer has a dark red to orange flavour from the kinds of malt used, yellow-green tones from hops (Cascade is intensely lemon yellow!) Some dark beers taste more brown than others. The best pilsners have a very pleasant, golden orange taste of fresh bread. Wheat beers and sour beers can even have blue tones, but bright blue usually means strong carbonation.

The idea of a beer spectrum came into my mind when my SO and I had a conversation over a beer in a local pub. "This stout has a more even spectrum than the Guinness. Guinness has a peak in the red part and the top green part, while this one has more orange" My SO gave me a strange look. He obviously didn't have this kind of mental image of beer. Now, he usually asks me for a spectrum when we try a new beer.

Guinness

Clausthaler Wheat

Staropramen

Mack Bayer

After a beer or two, the mental image becomes more pronounced. It tends to fade from my mind and get harder to recall afterwards, so in order to build up a collection of images, I should draw them while actually drinking the beer. The images above are easy to remember, because they represent favourite beers which I often drink.

How do I explain synesthesia?

"Sundays are white" 
"December is at the bottom of the year" 
"This song looks like a white brain"

As a child, I used to puzzle my parents with expressions like these. I couldn't understand what they thought was so strange about this. They couldn't understand what I meant. As I grew older, it became clear that almost nobody else shared these experiences. I wrote it off, stopped speaking of it and hid it inside my mind.

Not until I was an adult, almost 30 years later, did I first hear of synesthesia. My mother had heard it mentioned on TV, and reminded me: "Do you remember that Sundays were white? You should look at this..."

I experience most of the forms of synesthesia that are discussed in the Wikipedia article, but the strongest association is the one that shows sounds and smells as visual images. When a word has a colour, I don't see the colour strongly when I look at the letters of the word, but I see it when it is spoken out loud. The shapes are usually in 3D.

The song that looked like a white brain was an upbeat, big band version of a famous jazz song. A well known radio show in my country uses it as its intro. I can't find this specific version of it online, but I have found several others. Interestingly enough, they look different. Where the big band recording looks like a white brain, a slower version with the main melody played on a clarinet looks more like a dark green fractal tree. The general "winding" shape is the same, but the faster version has a lighter and more compact visual.

Smells have even stronger associations than sounds. I have learned that the sense of smell has a strong connection with the primitive, subconscious part of the brain, especially with old memories. I can often visualise a smell before my conscious mind can come up with the name for it. The smell of blood, for example, is a semi transparent iron grey blob.

I experience synesthesia stronger when my mind isn't fully alert. When I am very sleepy, intoxicated, or sick, the associations become stronger. This is especially an issue with (lucid) dreaming. The connection between a word, its sound, and its shape and colour is sometimes so strong that it makes the dream hard to type up.

One peculiar thing I have noticed is the fact that the lower quality the sound recording is, the less colourful and detailed is the image, unless the recording is of a sound I know very well. It is as if the brain fills in the blanks, and gives me the image I expect.

The article also links synesthesia with misophonia. I don't know if that is universal, but I definitely have misophonia too. Some sounds translate to fear and/or aggression. I wonder if that works in the same way as the connection between smells, memories and emotions.

Wikipedia article about synesthesia

A good article on Google+