Ever since I can remember, I've seen words in colors. These colors are constant and unchangeable, and as much an intrinsic property of the word as the arrangement of the letters. The word "pal," for instance, is always neon green. The word "bollocks" is always light blue. The word "agreeable" is always pillar-box red, and so on.
I had no idea this wasn't the way everyone perceived language until I once mentioned to my mate that "Wednesday is so obviously yellow," and she looked at me as if I'd just offered to sacrifice my first-born child. After some frantic googling, I discovered I had a mild and relatively common form of synaesthesia—"grapheme-color synaesthesia"—and not an incurable brain tumour, as I'd briefly suspected.
What's less common, however, are other forms of synaesthesia. Lexical-gustatory synesthesia, for instance, is experienced by less than 0.2 percent of the world's population, and refers to when people can taste sounds. In other words, that new Stormzy track might taste like ginger biscuits and barbecued meat, or your fave Aaliyah jam might conjure up the sweet deliciousness of blueberry pie. We wanted to know more about this very strange, almost super hero-style phenomenon, so we contacted the UK Synaesthesia Association. They put us in touch one of their committee members, James Wannerton, who can taste sounds to a pretty extreme level. As such, we sent him a playlist, he listened to the tracks, and then he kindly told us the flavors of each.
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