6 of the Most Distinctive Sensory Stories

by describe it as having bubblegum and once it's lost all its flavor you have just a piece of rubber that you chew over and over again that is essentially what food is like for me when I put food into my mouth my name is agent Malik and I have lost my sense of taste I suffered a cold and I started getting a metallic taste in my mouth once that finally left took my sense of taste with it it took me a few weeks to actually identify that it was my taste because I could smell perfectly I only eat foods now which spend very little time in the mouth because I don't extract any flavor the idea of a chocolate bar or a steak the way you chew it in order to bring out the juices and the flavors of it there's no enjoyment from it so I find myself eating very light foods like salads and rice and also I used the advantage of adding herbs in order to make the smell sensation quite enjoyable I also find its spice very important spicy is not actually something you taste it's something you feel it gives us that sort of tingle in my man you end up with a rather peculiar eating pattern that people look at you funny because you're putting chilies on your breakfast cereal and you've put in a a mustard sauce on pretty much a lot of the food you eat and almost three years now we're still not otherwise rooster why it's gone or getting my sense of tastes back it's like my world is washed out and I see fewer shades of color than most people do so normal people see a million colors I may see as many as a hundred million my name is Wendy I'm a producer at CNN and I am colorblind my name is Maureen Seberg I'm a tetrachromats and I'm an author tetrachromacy is the presence of a fourth cone class in your retina if I keep naming my invisible colors maybe I'll have my own Crayola box one day when I was in kindergarten my teacher called my parents because I was coloring the leaves of my trees and the trunks of my trees the same color because I couldn't really see the difference between green and brown the only time it was ever overwhelming is a paint contractor came to my house and brought no fewer than 32 samples before I was satisfied that it was a true beige when I pick out clothes that's hard I have been known to buy the outfit that the mannequin is wearing because I know that that goes together you don't want to go clothing shopping with me because the salespeople tell me but it matches and I can only look at them sympathetically and keep looking I never think like oh if I weren't color blind it would be so much easier to get dressed in the morning it's just it's kind of part of me I guess I'm a unicorn or something I started painting music just because I would try to explain synesthesia so many times it never quite made as much sense to describe it verbally so I thought it would be best just to put it on canvas just because I've always been an artist and it made it much easier for people to be able to understand it my name is Willis McCracken and I am a synesthetic artist synesthesia is a neurological condition where your brain is basically cross-wired so certain stimuli will come in and it'll create the wrong response in my brain so from me that's listening to music and it's translated into color in my head I'm going to paint superstition by Stevie Wonder I love the song superstition just because it's dynamic and funky and just fun and expressive whenever I start a piece that you listen to the song first to even know what kind of colors I'd like to use there are some songs that I hate that I'd like the way that they look a little bit like a lot of pop music it can be pink and purple and you know just all these fun bright colors but songs not that good so one or the other I appreciate it somehow you know you kind of really have to be in the right vibe to be able to paint if you're not in the right vibe you're not going to make anything good I think the prettiest onra of music is jazz music I love blues and golds and whites and it just seems very pearly and iridescent a little bit when I listen to Etta James at last the thing that stuck out most to me was just her voice at the very when she goes into the last then it's just a very bright and but also warm sort of feeling and very kind of classic jazzy which jazz music generally has a very gold and blue sort of look to it music has always been a very big part of my life my older brother is very musical and when I think back of him playing the guitar for me I think of the colors of what those memories are I was always a little disappointed because I was never very musically inclined it was really cool to have a way to bring music into you know my life in a different sort of way what is synesthesia everybody who has it experiences it in different ways so I asked a handful of people from around the world about their experience so somewhere in my brain the senses get mixed together when I experience one I'm also experiencing another that is completely unrelated what do you mean I color code numbers in my head so ever since I was a child I was able to taste work if I'm in physical pain I experienced the pain in color and shape sounds melodies and in fact sound tracks also has a color to me so what sort of associations would you make number three is blue number three is light blue three is yellow number six is a flirty woman four is green two is red 42 is green red that's my favorite number because I like the colors red and green together but wait it gets weird for example I love flesh dance songs she's a maniac is blue one for me but what a feeling is yellow word our people taste is like meatballs in tomato sauce violins as may be blue rectangles moving from right to left the word English taste is like a slice of lemon the sound of a banjo taste is like Oreos crazy right but a life without it hmm my life without synesthesia I don't want to imagine more empty less would be a lot more blue world would be very flat and not as colorful I would be bored smell we know when it's good and we know when it's bad but there's a woman in Scotland I'm joining them who can smell the unsmiling all my nose went on fire joy Milne is the only known person who can smell Parkinson's disease I have an extremely sensitive sense of smell I can smell it meanly on the forehead and the back of the neck to Joy it has a greasy musky odor it is just a heavy smell to me she first noticed it on her late husband les Milne 12 years before he was diagnosed I just thought he was tired and he wasn't shouting enough it wasn't very welcome of course me saying to mug you're smelling it wasn't until she attended a conference with other Parkinson's patients that she realized the smell was something more when I walked into the room I saw gosh these other people smell the same as last us at the end of meeting my stood up and said why were they not investigating the smell of Parkinson's no-one was investigating because no one else could smell it researchers set up a controlled experiment to test Joy's nose she was asked to distinguish a set of t-shirts worn by those with and without the disease she insisted one of the subjects in the control group had the musky scent the man run about eight months later and said I've got Parkinson's so I had pre diagnosed somebody by the time most people are diagnosed 80 to 90 percent of the damage is done so Joy's mission is to help scientists improve early detection methods if they can find these people earlier it would stop this anguish that would make such a difference so there's a direct correlation between tastes and sight you see something that looks delicious your mouth begins to water you see something sour you pucker but what about sound as it turns out sound has a direct effect on how your food tastes Oh hungry this concept is being studied by Professor Charles Spence I'm an experimental psychologist and a gastro physicist the research is in two parts part one we've found that although one hand people match music and instruments and pictures of sounds to different tastes and flavors and food and drink so listening to a musical scale you might say from this twizzler tastes like in a note and these pretzels taste like a G note and part two we then play matching music that corresponds to what you're tasting you can use that to bring out and actually change people's experience of sweetness of flavor in the food and drinks that they are consuming just like you can pair wine with cheese Spence says that you can pair music with wine Tchaikovsky's string quartets low-pitched sounds kind of rumbling Vitamix better to sort of a heavy red wine to bring out business whereas Mozart's flute concerto it's a much better match for certain white wines showing that we can bring out the sweetness he actually calls it sonic seasoning and while music has now been proven to accentuate flavor it can also dull it loud background noises actually dull are salty and sweet taste receptors think about that next time you served peanuts and pretzels on an airplane souls of the sweet taste do tend to be suppressed by that background noise the one flavor scent however that's not impacted umami this is savory think tomatoes 'if carrots soy would eat on the airplane it's amazing how many people order tomato juice and Bloody Marys the umami taste is one that is not suppressed by loud noise like the sound of the engines rumbling it's an interesting concept and in the very least the next time you go out to eat I guarantee you'll pay just a little more attention to the music that's playing in the background

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 1,952,758

Rating: 4.9093432 out of 5

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, great big reel, senses, taste, tetrachromatic, colors, synesthesia, painting, health, sensory, Parkinson's, smell, food, sound, five senses, art, sight, documentary, docs, weird & fun knowledge, new releases

Id: CpnDkV4xfIs

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2016