How I got to my thirties, with a degree in psychology, with a focus on Neuroscience, without knowing *this* was synesthesia.

Synesthesia is a condition where when one sense is activated another sense is triggered along with it. When I studied psychology and neuro (as a dual major in Biology and Psychology,) I learned all about it, without ever realizing I was a synesthete.

My first real experience that something was different for me was in drama camp as a kid. Some new age hippy dippy people came in for a lecture, and one of the exercises was to close your eyes as one of them struck a chime, and describe what you 'felt,' or 'saw,' and for how long.

I closed my eyes, and put my head down, and put my cupped hands over my eyes, because the lights through my eyelids made everything sort of pink, until I got to a deep reddish-black. They struck the chime, and the sound of the wood on the chime made a white flash, followed by a deep blue that started as a small circle in the center of my field of vision and grew, to the point where it was a blue so very deep and intense that it was slightly painful. When the blue reached the edges of my field of vision it broke into white stars, sort of like when the Enterprise is moving through space. They all faded, slowly, towards the bottom of my field of vision, dripping to the bottom and slowly fading to black.

People started "describing" their feelings before the blue was gone. I've been tested by a buttload of hearing and sensitivity experts, and we know I hear high and low pitches at the far end of normal human hearing, and I'd already had enough hearing tests to understand why the kids thought the thing was completed, and when the guest speaker put her hand on the chime and stopped it I figured it was for she and I, who could still hear it.

So, being typical method actors to be, the kids described the feelings the chime put in them. It got around to me, and I described the images I had, whereupon everyone looked at me like a freak...they were purely visual, and I assumed everyone saw them.

As a kid I also would bury my head in the side of a stuffed chair and look at the images the ambient noise made. I used to say these were cartoons, but while they weren't cartoons, the colors were bright, vibrant and cartoonish. When I was older and alone I'd do the same thing trying to recreate the experience, but it wasn't until recently I realized the hit and miss quality of it had everything to do with the noise in the room.

What finally started on the realization that this was not normal was discovering that the rest of you don't see lightning when your eyes are closed, your head under a pillow and the lightning hasn't arrived yet....

When I hear thunder, I see flashes of light, which is normal, except that since the speed of light and the speed of sound are different, I usually see the lightning twice, once when I hear the thunder, and a second time when I see the lightning...and the lightning is pink, blue or off white the second time, and a preternatural white the rest of the time.

Since discovering that not everyone else has this, we've explored the limit of it. I see colors for sound, and the colors are brighter the louder the noise is. Normal ambient noise, in a well-lit room usually goes unnoticed, but loud sharp noises, or noises in a dimly lit or largely white room start to annoy me.

Perhaps strangely enough, we're not convinced it's really *sound* that causes this, as the effect seems to have a direct correlation to physical sensations of vibration. Touching a subwoofer, for example, causes the colors to become so bright, and so prevalent, that it's pretty much all I can see, while headphones induce only mild colors, unless turned way up.

But if I, trained and knowledgeable about this stuff, thought my experiences were normal, I believe that synesthesia is much more prevalent than we assume.

Not sure where I was going with this, except to say that I wish I had it in one of those dramatic forms, rather than thin clouds of color that a colorful room can eliminate.