Here’s one I bet you’ve never heard of: tactile-emotion synesthesia.  Care to even guess what it is? 

People with tactile-emotion synesthesia feel a specific emotion is when touching something.  For instance, in the article I read, one woman felt emotions of disgust when she touched dry leaves or fleece.  The feeling of tennis balls and fresh leaves she described as heaven. 

Another woman described corduroy as confusion while denim made her feel depressed.  Further still, fine-grained sand paper felt like telling a white lie, she said.  Not everyone who experiences this feels the same emotions when touching the same things, but many of them are similar.

Synesthesia is a cerebral phenomenon that makes a stimulation to one sensory, automatically and involuntarily lead to a second sensory.  Other forms of synesthesia include color-graphemic synesthesia and ordinal linguistic personification. 

Color-graphemic synesthesias see letters and numbers as certain colors.  One man reported that 'S' is red, 'H' is orange, 'C' is yellow, 'J' is yellow-green, 'G' is green, 'E' is blue, 'X' is purple, 'I' is pale yellow, '2' is tan, '1' is white. If he wrote SHCJGEX it registered as a rainbow when he read over it. 

Forms of ordinal linguistic personification date back to the 1890s.  This form of synesthesia associates sequences, such as days, months, and letters with personalities.  The letter ‘I’ could be a bit of a worrier at times, although easy-going. The letter ‘J’ may be male and ‘K’ may be female; quiet, responsible.  The month of ‘February’ could be an introverted female.  One man stated that the number ‘8’ is a very dignified lady, who acts appropriately.

More studies have to be done to pinpoint how synesthesia occurs and why, but researchers think it has to do with cross-talk between different regions of the brain that specialize in the different functions.  However, most people who have some form of synesthesia, especially color-graphemic synesthesia, think that it’s normal and that everyone else is experiencing the same thing.  Nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman said

“When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students."

Are you someone who sees letters or numbers as colors?  Do you associate textures with feelings?  I wish I had this “talent”.  Let me know if you do.  I would love to hear about your experiences!

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