The world has never been more exciting than this. It is full of colors, flavors, smells, different and unique music and symphonies. It is wonderful, like a dream mixed with reality.
This dream can become a nightmare very easily though.
Walking near a garbage can, Alessio not only perceives its stench, but also its vomiting taste, its out of tune and slow music, its moist and sticky consistency …
This synaesthesia is an amplifier. If something is beautiful, synaesthesia makes it five times more beautiful; if the eye likes a geometric shape, it shares that pleasure with all the other senses, quintupling it. But if something is bad, needless to say that the “displeasure” is equally fivefold and shared beetwen allt he sense.
Horror movies now terrify him much more than before for example. Scary noises create frightening shapes, scary smells and tastes (like the smell of blood) and give frightening sensations to the skin, which varies according to the type of noise (a sudden scream gives the feeling of being attacked, while a slow and disturbing symphony gives the feeling of being tied up, and so on …).
Now Alessio also struggles to see simple horror movie trailers.
Comic films have gotten a lot better though. If a joke makes Alessio laugh, it takes on a hilarious taste, a hilarious smell, and gives him the feeling that someone is tickling him … and that makes that joke five times more fun than it really should.
Many times Alessio found himself bursting out laughing at stupid nonsense and continuing for minutes without being able to stop.
Over time he has also discovered that synaesthesia works “the other way around”. He found that some foods are funny, for example. They are good, but if their taste is turned into sound… that sound is fun. And he laughs.
Other foods are disturbing instead. Good or not, if eaten they echo an unnerving and slow background. Some chips he loved to eat have this weird effect. Eating them his brain begins to produce a slow and sad melody, and only later did he realize that what he was eating was actually poisonous to him: those chips were slowly damaging his organism, so as good as they were their music was sad.
Studying this phenomenon, he understood that by combining “fun foods” with comedy films or evenings with friends, a multiplicative effect is created: everything becomes more fun. But not only for him, his friends also seem to feel the effects. They eat with more relish and laugh more often.
On the other hand, combining “scary foods” with horror films creates the most terrifying effect he have ever experienced. For several days he also struggled to sleep because of this. Even now he sleeps with a light on in fact. The mere memory of that evening is almost traumatizing for him.
Knowing how to cook, he also decided to start cooking based mainly on the other senses and partially ignoring the taste. The results for now are very good, much better than his expectations.
If he cooks healthy but horrible tasting food, the melody she hears will be “good” but the taste “bad”. Cooking good but unhealthy foods has the opposite effect: good taste but bad music. Thanks to this Alessio is starting to cook foods that are as good as they are healthy, so that he can enjoy both good music and a good dish.
And then there is the skate. He saw a boy go so well on the board that he produced an undertone he has never heard in his life again. Not only that: the smell and taste of his moves were exquisite, addictive.
And now he is addicted to it.
He started skating more frequently not only for the fun of it, but also because he wants to produce sounds similar to what he had heard. He hasn’t reached that level yet, but he has certainly improved in his board control, which is well above average thanks to the improvements he has received in the nervous system from me.
The world has changed for him. Completely. It is something else. Now even just seeing people walking can be interesting. There are people who walk generating a cheerful jingle, others who walk generating a sad litany; there are people who smell perfume while walking, while others stink; there are even people who sparkle when they walk.
But this means that there are people who cause unpleasant sensations when walking. Children, for example, generate out of tune and out of time notes, flavors that are sometimes salty and sometimes sweet, lights that are first strong and then weak … they are really difficult to watch because walking in an uncoordinated way produces equally uncoordinated sensations. Now Alessio always tries to avoid them.
They are not the only thing he avoids though. He doesn’t like some sports, and if he didn’t feel anything in watching them distractedly in the past, now he feels annoyed.
He also notice the little things too easily now. Microexpressions during a discussion have their own, albeit tiny, sound; the bread crumbs falling on the clothes generate sounds different from those falling on the table; the right hand generates a different, albeit similar, noise to the left hand… and so on.
At first he hated being forced to notice these details, they make him seem too picky. Now, however, he is learning to exploit them.