I spent a day with SYNESTHETES (Neurological condition aka SYNESTHESIA)

synesthesia a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sense activates another completely unrelated scent at the same time like tasting words or perceiving color when hearing sound music and voices the greek philosopher and mathematician pythagoras who displayed signs of synesthesia himself produced the first known description of a condition around 500 bce but experts believe the genetic basis for synesthesia has been present throughout all of human history with it now occurring in around two to four percent of the world's population my name's anthony padilla and today i'm going to be sitting down with sinister to learn what it's really like to perceive the world in such a colorful and often unspoken way have these synesthetes acquired somewhat of an evolutionary advantage in their ability to experience multiple senses at once in a way that others can only imagine or does synesthesia impair their ability to experience reality in the way that society has deemed acceptable [Music] hello skye hi luke hi it's nice to meet you nick hey what's up man thank you so much for coming on here and teaching me about the world of synesthesia thank you for having me what do you consider yourself a sinister someone who experiences the world in a more vibrant way a synthesis is the the correct term i say i'm a person who just experiences the world differently i'm just a guy true i understand there's multiple types of synesthesia can you run through any of those so almost any linking of the senses that you could imagine exists in some form of synesthesia for me personally pretty much anything that's linked to sight so i have graphene color synesthesia where numbers and letters are images and colors i have chromesia which is sound i see taste my synthesia when i hear music or when i hear noises people talking that triggers a sense and then i also have um people who have colors so people have their individual colors like their aura type thing and their names are also colored like that and they some people have tastes part of what i have is called chrome anesthesia which is specifically sound to color i have another thing where anything that's kind of in an order so days of the week months numbers years all of them tend to have some sort of color assigned to them can you run me through exactly how your senses overlap any time i read anything i see the numbers and letters that i'm reading inside of my head always in the same font always in the exact same color in the order that i'm reading them so it becomes very familiar it's completely involuntary with sound and and the other senses it's a little more abstract it really shows up mostly in the form of shapes squiggles vibrations clouds that that align with the the noises that i'm hearing you know when you're talking i can see brown spots so that's pretty cool i'm brown i'm able to you're um light brown with like dark brown spots okay so kind of like you don't have a taste unfortunately i have no taste you don't have a taste i'm sorry so whenever you talk um you know even though you're on a zoom call right now i can like see your kind of ring around you so it doesn't have to be in person it can be remote like this and you can still experience these the exact same uh feelings and sensations yeah i see them in photographs videos it's kind of like a ring around you and then whenever you're speaking it's kind of like i would say it's kind of like you're breathing out like like huffs you know and it comes out in that color you know that that light brown with like little dark brown spots in it and it kind of just comes out of you like kind of like you're vaping or whenever like someone breathes out a cigarette and like that little smoke comes out kind of like that kind of look but like light brown yeah it's whenever you talk though so it's not like you're like like it's like actually your brother i came prepared i can't just whip out the tallest and giantest violin i've ever seen not a violin that's a violin i assigned notes color this is an e fly so i see that as a light brown so for all you south park fans yes there is a dandy note no no the brown note is real but see not every note in that scale it's not brown and so it's cool to have the brown and then the b flat this is a b flat which is a reddish maroonish color i guess and then when i hit this note it's like a aquamarine color people who have tastes so whenever i'm around them i'm constantly tasting that so it can be kind of inconvenient especially when i'm someone who has a taste and i'm eating something because then i can yeah and you can't taste what you're actually eating exactly i can't enjoy myself eating my cake because i'm with this girl who tastes like oranges like you know and i hate oranges so is it because because it ruins so much of your food i start to hate whatever they taste like because i'm like i taste it all the time like and so i start avoiding them and they're like why are you so mean to me i'm like i'm sorry you just taste like so bad you know damn well in that case i'm glad i don't taste like something right now i might be putting you through some kind of misery there was a girl in my physics class my junior year of high school and she tasted like rancid garbage not just garbage rancid moldy garbage i'm sure she was a lovely person whenever i hit those notes i just kind of see the colors the different colors pop in and out how do you feel when you hear something bigger like a bigger piece a symphony or something honestly while one would want to think it's just like fantasia like it's just this massive thing the sound is this like physical three-dimensional object and so like if i hear something like you know just like just real like that yeah i can almost just see it whereas if it's whispered where if it's like [Music] you hear that breath it's just kind of like the color is just lighter and it just kind of drifts off like like it's in the wind somewhere you know before we continue learning about the world of synesthesia when i woke up in the morning that the colors were gone it was almost like the world was like black and gray and white and there was no color to it i wasn't seeing it i wanted to take a moment to talk about the importance of voting if you're watching this from the future or don't live in the u.s feel free to just go ahead and skip forward 30 seconds seeing as how everyone's reality is different regardless of if it's anesthesia related or a class divide or background we should really ensure that we're standing up for those with unheard voices who may even experience a wholly different reality from our own this of course all starts by making sure you're registered to vote before the election on november 3rd and learning about the issues that'll be on your specific ballot this year and that may sound confusing as hell to you because honestly sometimes it is so check out the link in the description for vote save america for a one-stop shop for everything that you need to know they provide election updates and have a voter ballot guide with information about each candidate and proposition so you have all the information that you would need to vote for what you believe in now back to the world of synesthesia how close to actually experiencing these senses is it does it does it feel like it's real or can you easily distinguish between what you're actually experiencing in reality and versus what you're experiencing in your head if you thought of a very early childhood memory it's just kind of faded you still remember the details it's like if you remember like your preschool or something you kind of remember the layout but it's not vivid as if you walked in there yesterday it's just kind of there it's kind of like if you were to smell the scent of cookies in the oven and it would trigger some some bit of like nostalgia like a memory of your grandmother making cookies when you're younger and you kind of feel the feeling of maybe the the sunset setting through the window and the warmth and the scent of the room and it kind of just like hits you and you can describe what those feelings feel like but you can't really explain in the specifics too much is that right you you just did it holy crap you just did it well okay cool my job here is done goodbye was there a single specific moment when you realized that you perceived reality different than others so i was in college and i was walking with a friend of mine to grab some food and i'm very lucky because this student was a psychology and computer science major with a math minor and i am a math student i was a math student and so we were having this kind of nerdy conversation about math and that's when i brought up that no one ever talks about you know the shape of the letters when they're doing the math and you know i never would have had that conversation with anybody about a math student but because he was also a psychology student he was like oh yeah no you're not normal that's a thing that's called synesthesia and it was kind of mind-blowing it's so weird it's like it's just an understood silent thing that just everyone feels and no one describes oh i feel attacked but that's exactly what i thought i just thought everyone experienced the world away up until fourth grade when i was in art class and she asked us to write her names and i decided to write my name in my color which my real name's color is green grass and it smells like shaving green grass and it feels kind of texture in my hand so i can feel i don't taste like anything though and the girl next to me decided to write her name in pink and i asked her uh why don't you write your name in your color like that just makes more like you had already seen her color and you thought that that she would see it that way too at the time yes um and when she didn't agree with me and she didn't understand what i was talking about it kind of hit me in the head that this this i might be the only one experiencing this type of thing how did you feel when you realized that your reality was different than the reality of what society is themed as normal for a very brief time i had a little bit of an identity crisis and that's only because um i i'm a math student i'm a mathematician now and i kind of had this thought in my head that like i'm a pretty good mathematician but i also see numbers interacting in my head when i do math so am i good because i'm good or am i good because you know my mind is a cheat code and i had to figure that out ultimately i decided it's a little bit of both and i came to terms with that were you ever formally diagnosed or is it kind of just uh completely unnecessary for this condition you know when there's something that's diagnosed it's usually because something is bothering you because you know it's usually something like okay this is obviously something different about me and i want to know what this is and i didn't experience that because i just thought this is how it is a lot of the research on synesthesia is behind because when people talked about their synesthesia there were psychologists who had an inkling that this was a condition and there were also people who thought that you know this very poetic way of talking about sound like nice metaphor and it took a long time for the community to recognize that we were being literal so there may have been documents throughout history describing this but it can just almost be interpreted as a metaphor putting words to these other feelings well there certainly are very old documents that are clearly looking at it now results of synesthesia especially musicians talking about their music that sound very poetic if you don't know about synesthesia but then medically fascinating if you do do you think this overlap in senses was ever an evolutionary advantage i think at one point it might have been an advantage which is why it just developed in some brains and since it is genetic it definitely is passed down right so someone in my family definitely had it so it definitely skipped a couple people my family and it just somehow made its way to me has synesthesia been an advantage for you personally as a mathematician and an educator i think that a lot of the reason that i'm as good as i am at the math that i've learned is that using these numbers and letters that are interacting in my head it's not that that teaches you how to do math but you kind of learn to recognize and label the relationships that you're seeing and that relational understanding is the foundation of good mathematics have you ever met anyone else with synesthesia you know it's kind of one of those things where it's like yeah i'll give you a fist bump over it but there's also an aspect where i get a little confrontational almost i have this like irrational thing going where like if if you have graphene color your alphabet is wrong and my alphabet is right and i hate when you say the letter's the wrong color yeah i mean that makes sense that's like if if i perceived um you know the rainbow to be in a specific order someone comes in and starts moving them around be like hey no uh uh get your hands off my rainbow this is right it's just like someone walking up to you and just factually straight face saying that sky is yellow no it's not stop it or saying climate change is a hoax yeah completely just shut them down are there any downsides to having synesthesia if there's one negative it's that studying and listening to music at the same time is just a lost cause because when both of those these are set up at the same time i'm not getting anything would you ever want to know what it feels like to not have synesthesia just so you could maybe see what most people perceive as reality a lot of people would since you agree that when times um there's a lot of trauma in the brain and there's a lot of emotions happening in the brain that sometimes their synesthesia just will wake up and it'll be gone and we'll experience the world like you do and i've experienced that probably twice in my life they were at very very low moments in my life where my depression and anxiety was just so heavy on me that when i woke up in the morning that the colors were gone so mine was gone for a couple days and it was a very strange experience because i was listening to the music that once made me feel really good and now like the world was just like it was almost like the world was like black and gray and white and there was no color to it i wasn't seeing it it's almost like the visualization of what depression feels like it's all the color from your life all the vibrancy just being drained it was like the happiness had left the world you know for a couple days for me at least and it felt um it's pretty scary for the most part you know my synesthesia is just it's just a part of me it's a part of the way i experience the world and i don't want to wake up and not have it anymore can i say i'm jealous a little bit that you get to experience all these very unique things in a way that i will never ever be able to understand truly yeah a lot of people get jealous they're like i wish i had that power i'm like it's a blessing and a curse yeah okay yeah like i don't think a lot of people who wish they had it would be able to handle having something like if they were wake up one day and just have it yeah it would just be you know insane i think i would only want to be able to experience it whenever i wanted whenever it was convenient because i feel like it could just be absolutely overwhelming to almost have to filter everything that you're experiencing so that you don't appear completely distracted and you know i have to avoid certain doing certain things because you know there have been um like like drugs for instance and like sex a lot of people with synesthesia say it can be sometimes very overwhelming doing those two things because um they trigger a lot of a lot more colors and i'm obviously not used to doing that so i'd rather just stay away from the time being and experience my world as is right now do you think everyone has synesthesia to any small extent even among synesthesia i think that some people have it more powerfully than others maybe a stronger connection or more connections but i would imagine that everybody to some degree has some type of statistician so there might be some kind of difference between each of these senses and maybe it's even attached yeah it's like i've had conversations with people who very casually mentioned that you know five is a boy and they don't see any other numbers of letters as a gender but that specific one and that counts you know everybody's brains can connect in a certain way that's exactly like synesthesia the biggest way memories can be triggered is actually through through music but if i went see everybody knows that you know the brain just connects that together right it can kind of finish songs because it has that memory almost burned in not everybody has synesthesia every everybody's brain connects to senses together and two things so of course you were able to connect the sounds of these notes and you're able to finish that melody right either that or i'm just a fortune teller exactly maybe has synesthesia ever affected your schooling or any jobs you know i worked at mcdonald's you know for a little bit in high school and there would be so much things happening in the kitchen and the drive-thru there would someone be talking trying to order right in front of me but you know it'd just be kind of overwhelming sometimes those are the definitely the moments where i'm like i want to turn it off like i just i want to be able to concentrate on what this person's saying and not constantly be distracted by the taste and the you know and the textures and the you know the colors that are happening right now why do you think people with synesthesia often end up being some kind of artist i think it just makes sense to be able to to mix those colors and to be able to think okay well if i'm thinking of this you know this concept and this concept and both of these are these colors you know these colors just kind of mix in together and so it just comes out i feel like it just makes sense that you you almost can't help but want to express yourself when you feel those feelings [Music] that felt good i don't have synesthesia but i do know that that felt good in every part of my body oh yeah catherine wants to know if you ever get tired of people constantly asking you what color they are one thousand percent because they'll think like their color will change and if they don't like the color so you know if i tell someone oh your color you're like green with you know a couple black streaks through it uh maybe with a little hint of like white sparkles in there and they're like i don't like that like can you change it and i'm like no it's my mind i cannot change that you got to start charging for this i get that people have a lot of questions and i don't mind questions but sometimes it can just be a little bit overbearing does any part of you fear that doing this will get you more people asking about it or do you think it'll kind of help you know you could kind of point them to this without having to re-explain yourself every time maybe doing this will help people understand so i feel like this is gonna be a good thing but also it's going to bring a lot more skeptics in my life who are like i don't know i did a whole video about it how could you not be sure bumblebee bree wants to know if there are any specific words or numbers or letters that you avoid just because you don't like the way they taste smell or look my least favorite numbers are five seven and eight um their personalities are just you know kind of mean personalities five is she's a little bit more snobby um she thinks she's better she's think she's the best number and i'm like no no no no she's nice and everyone uses her everyone counts in five what's sad is that my birthday is made up out of five so i'm like oh my god this freaking girl i hate her so much you know what they're going to say some letters you know i just don't really like that well like the letter z w um j look at jay trying to rear his head here he's not welcome you know i go to a christian college and we're having to take like christian classes and you know the word jesus is you know has a j in it you know what i mean like i don't want i don't want to see him here ian wants to know if when you're driving and you turn on music or try to listen to music in your car does it get distracting while you're trying to drive like sometimes if i'm on a quiet road at night just like driving down the highway i'm totally enjoying the light show with my eyes but again it's not my actual range of sight so it doesn't stop yeah observing the road i would say i'm still attentive so so no it doesn't it doesn't cause any sort of problem like that it sounds like you're you're almost like you have the ability to just be driving with the aurora borealis constantly showing a light show in the sky at all times that's that's not a bad comparison i think the best comparison in the real world that i can think of is windows media player like those old like screen shows that it will play with i love those things oh my god man i would just stare at that all day yeah i have that constantly it was requested for me to do a video on synesthesia hundreds if not thousands of times in the past couple months i have no idea why i don't know if it's people coming out of the woodwork with synesthesia wanting to to see other people talk about it but if there's anyone watching who has synesthesia is there anything that you'd want to say to them i just want to say that you are not alone um what you have is for the most part normal and the way you experience this world is going to be a lot different than everybody else it's going to be hard sometimes there are going to be days where you wish you'd never had synesthesia and you know you wish your world was normal but trust me our lives are a lot more interesting with it rather than people who don't has synesthesia affected any of your relationships throughout your life there was a boy in middle school that i had like a huge crush on like huge it's kind of embarrassing his color was just not not the greatest it was like a rotting like moldy uh mango and he tasted a little bit like a moldy mango so it kind of gave me a clue into his character a little bit it didn't end up working out which you know i'm glad to because you know imagine like being married to someone with a bad taste right that must suck i feel like with a lot of people with synesthesia they tend to avoid those people and not make relationships or friendships with people who have that taste in their opinion which is like i am sorry to do that but i just can't be around you you know because i can't i can't constantly be tasting that gross yeah it makes me gag what do you think the biggest misconception is about synesthesia or more so synthesis overall just that we're lying you know people who don't believe us or people who are like you know i don't have and i don't experience it that way therefore you can't do it it kind of makes me a smaller person that way because i'm like you're just doubting you know what i'm experiencing just because you don't i actually have a parting gift for you oh my god the best interviewer shirt which you could get at dildoshop.com but for you skye i will ship this to you for free oh my gosh i've always wanted one are you serious yeah no i've always wanted one all right you got five seconds to shout out or promote anything you want directly into camera go subscribe to ray chen and join his discord shout out to the family of vab um i hope that everyone's doing well and i appreciate them for letting me know about miss anesthesia follow me on instagram at skykdomingus wear masks put your pronouns in your bio black lives matter and visit do the right thing dot card dot co to learn how you can take action in the world today subscribe to anthony padilla what are you doing if you're not subscribing to him you have the time you're sitting here watching this probably 20 minute video and you definitely have time to click one red little button click it click it and guess what if you click that button maybe you'd get some seizure from it you might want to try it just to know for sure and then you need to leave it clicked even when you find out that that definitely won't happen thank you so much skye i feel like i understand the world of synesthesia just a little bit more thank you that's all i want nick can you play us out on this one i got you after spending the day with these sinisters i've come to understand that while not a superpower in the traditional sense synesthesia certainly shapes the way these individuals perceive the world and we could all benefit from remembering just how much each of our realities differ from those around us see you later bye guys [Music] so you're constantly getting to experience the feeling of eating cake or some kind of junk food i see a crawling human in the back and that is so wonderful that is that is the best thing i've ever seen on the camera he just caught you i'm sorry she's trying to i think she's trying to leave she doesn't want it why don't you just walk she thought she

Channel: AnthonyPadilla

Views: 1,209,168

Rating: 4.9784708 out of 5

Keywords: anthony padilla, padilla, anthony, i spent a day with, interview, synesthesia, synesthetes, neurological condition

Id: lP58G70QmpA

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Alienwithsynesthesia]

i suggested this!

its out!

[u/stvckyxholland]

hi! i'm sky from the video :)

[u/grathuu]

definitely gonna watch this later

[u/Hysmina]

That was so interesting! Thanks for sharing :)

[u/Coolio_IzzyB]

Ahh I’ve been waiting for this!!!

[u/TreyGvge]

YESSSS

[u/gamermelon2207]

This is the video that made me question my life. I’ve always been interested in the idea of synesthesia. However, I never once for a second thought that I had it. My reasoning: I didn’t see colors while listening to music, tastes words, feel sounds, see peoples’ colors, see the colors of peoples’ names, etc. Though, it made me wonder about one specific aspect of my life that I thought was normal for everyone. I did some research and I found the answer. Turns out, I have “Ordinal Linguistic Personification”. I thought it was normal to think about letters and numbers as if they had genders and personalities. Apparently, not. My brother thinks I’m bragging because of how much I’ve been talking about it recently, but it’s just thrown me for a loop. This seemingly mundane part of me is actually quite unique and interesting and I had no idea for most of my life! Though, I’ve been feeling sort of jealous and left out because it seems like all the other syntesthetes have super cool, useful, and interesting “powers”. Mine just seems like something anyone can make up, despite me never making up any of the letter’s/number’s genders or personalities. Is there something useful, helpful, interesting, or unique that I could do using my OLP Synesthesia?