When I met my husband and found out his name was Philip, I felt conflicted. I liked him as a person but his name tasted like crunchy green pears and I don’t like green pears at all. My compromise was to call him Phil, which tastes more like stewed pear – sweeter and not as crunchy. It’s just a nicer-tasting name in my mind.
Fortunately I was 30 by the time I met Phil, so I had an explanation for my word-taste associations, after years of strange looks from family and friends. I had lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, one of the rarest forms of the phenomenon, in which words or sounds trigger taste sensations. Researchers estimate it affects just 0.2% of the population.
I can’t recall when I started tasting people’s names, exactly. It began with me seeing certain foods when I heard certain words. There was a boy called Kevin in my primary school class and, whenever I’d hear his name, I’d see an image of bacon – which is odd, because I didn’t know about the actor Kevin Bacon back then. I do remember I was always particularly good at remembering names. My primary school teacher was fascinated by the fact that I could recite the register backwards.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I started actually tasting foods on my tongue when I heard people’s names – it must have been in early adulthood – but I can remember the lightbulb moment I found out it was an actual known phenomenon. I was 28 and visiting the Melbourne Museum when I happened to walk into an exhibition on synaesthesia and some of the most common forms like grapheme-colour. As I read about it, my brain lit up. I yelled out to my parents, this is me, this is what I have! Even though there was no mention of my form of the phenomenon, something in me knew it was what I had. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever read.
There are two forms of lexical-gustatory synaesthesia: some people just see the image of a certain food when they hear a certain word. For others, that word triggers an actual taste on their tongue.
I seem to have both forms, depending on the word. Bob, for example, tastes like a milk chocolate Easter egg on my tongue. For the name Adrian, I get toilet cleaner – but I don’t actually taste it, thank goodness.
Naming my children was tough, for obvious reasons. Lucas, my son’s name, tastes like a very ripe banana being squashed or mashed, and for me that texture is OK because I like bananas. My daughter Alyssa’s name is trickier because it has to be spelled a specific way to taste OK. For Elissa, for example, I see a blister that needs to be popped. Her father and I eventually settled on Alyssa, which brings up an image of autumn leaves falling. I can’t taste anything when I hear her name but I can feel the crunch of it.
There are some words I prefer not to say because they don’t feel nice in my mouth – my first home was on Chewings Street, which tasted like a piece of gum that had lost its flavour. Others will come up and feel like ice-cream. Fellow, for example, feels soft and pillowy, like marshmallows in my hand. It’s not a conscious thing and I wouldn’t say it’s particularly useful day-to-day. But it can make a fun party trick. Sometimes, friends will call me out of the blue and say: “Hey, I’m with my cousin Sarah, what taste does she bring up for you?”
I often wonder whether there are any other elements of my being that are linked to my synaesthesia. My sensitivity to smell, for example.
Facebook groups such as Synaesthesia World have helped me to find a community and understand my brain better over the last decade or so. I’ve chatted to people with everything from grapheme-colour synaesthesia to auditory-visual synaesthesia but I am yet to meet another lexical-gustatory synaesthete in person. I’d love to, because I think we’d have the most fascinating conversation – as long as they have a nice-tasting name, of course.
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Anina Rich, a cognitive neuroscientist and chair of the Synaesthesia Research Group at Macquarie University, assisted in reporting this series
