other factoids:
the word "nancy" tastes like chocolate cake batter. i owe my parents BIG. :)
in the course of a sentence, i will taste 2, 3, maybe 4 flavors. the taste only lasts as long as the sound does - in other words, a nanosecond. so, yes. i am hungry all the time. ("hungry" tastes like hashed brown potatoes.)
non-word sounds that i taste include instrumental music. violin music, for example, tastes like tomato sauce. depending on the exact form that the violin music takes, the tomato sauce may be more or less sweet, more or less garlicky, etc. but it's always tomato sauce. LOVE ME some itzhak perlman!
traffic can sometimes have flavor, but not always. when it does, it's usually when the cars are going fast and the flavor is usually citrusy. mostly grapefruit-y.
mostly, i taste words. and yes. i have to hear the word in order to taste it. just reading it doesn't do it. (although....because i am so accustomed to hearing words and tasting them, i am familiar with which words taste like what. so, when i read, i still get a faint flavor, but it's more like a function of "referred pain" (if you're familiar with that concept; and if you're not, look it up.) than it is a matter of actually tasting it. if that makes sense. (hell, none of this makes sense!)
speaking of not making sense, some of the sounds that i taste don't actually exist. or at least, not in the form that i taste them. take the name "roger," for instance. it tastes like a thick rope with mayonnaise on it. ok, so, yes, i'm weird, but i'm not that weird. i have never seen and certainly have never eaten a rope with mayonnaise on it.
i have food on my mind 24/7. well, that's a lie. not when i sleep. otherwise, yes. it's all food, all the time for me. "food" tastes like applesauce - but not the chunky kind, just the smooth kind. texture enters into the picture sometimes, too. that's part of where my ability to "feel" sounds comes in.
some other examples of feeling sounds are the words "kevin" and "steve." also "kim." when i hear the word "kevin," it feels like someone is tapping on my front upper teeth. with "steve," my upper left arm burns - sort of like how it feels when you have a sunburn. "kim" makes my throat sore.
yes, i took my synesthesia very much into consideration when i named my daughter. "abby" tastes like apple dumplings. that's kind of a sound-alike....."abby....apple...." sometimes words do taste the way they sound. but not often.
and yes. abby and eli (tastes like lemon jello when it's still in the liquid form).....abby and eli ran all the potential names for their children by me before settling on them. i couldn't be havin' my grandchildren named something that made me gag!
i talk a lot about how names taste but it isn't just names. most words have flavor. it's just that everybody is more intrigued with how names - especially their name - taste, so i tend to talk about that more often.
i had a friend - lisa (tastes like sauerkraut) - in college who wrote a term paper on me and my synesthesia. she talked about how, at that time, there wasn't too much research on the subject and the phenomenon wasn't very well understood yet. she remarked that she hoped that scientists in the future would devote more time to the study of synesthesia (because it's a fascinating subject) and that she looked forward to the day when she could understand her friend (me) better. she closed her paper by saying,
"until that day comes, nancy will continue eating her words."
yes, i will. and writing them, too.
:)
