| my "negative" synesthesiae
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Synesthesia is not always considered a gift by all synesthetes, even though almost every last one of them would rather not part with what they have. In my case, I greatly enjoy what some call my "extra senses", but thoughout my life I have had two problems of sorts which I believe to be synesthetic in nature.
When I was doing a short study on synesthesia in the fall of 2001 on my college campus, I found three chromagraphemic synesthetes. Of the three, one was a projector ("sees color") and two were associators ("gets a feeling of color"). Two out of the three were like myself in that there were certain stimuli they could not stand. One could not stand to hear metal, such as the sound of silverware clanging together and soforth. She said the sound makes her physically feel awful, gives her shivers, and is quite like a severe endurance of nails-on-chalkboard, a phenomenon which many people can relate to.
I myself do not have any problem with metal — in fact, I often enjoy the sound — but I do have the same reaction to paper and similarly-textured items, such as cardboard, unpolished or unvarnished wood. If I touch paper, hear the sound of paper, or even think about touching paper or think about hearing paper, I have the same reaction. Further, the sound or thought of paper touching other paper sends me up a wall. It has truly been a difficult and displeasing experience to function throughout years of school, having the need to touch paper on a regular basis and, in elementary school, being always forced to write with wooden pencils. The experience is positively abominable at places like restaurants where tablecloths are brown paper and on which paper napkins lie.
I try to keep my paper-touching to an absolute minimum. But, whenever I do have to touch paper, I try, if possible, to touch it with my fingernails as opposed to my skin, because the feel of paper on my fingernails is merely a pressure, not a "textured touch". The picture above shows me at a star party in '01. (I was trying to avoid the camera in a Monty Python Sir Robinish kind of way. ;) In it, I am holding the piece of paper near the edges so that less of my skin has to touch it.
One of those I interviewed, a graduate student in the history department, has the very same problem(s) with paper. Unlike me, however, she has the patience to go so far as to laminate every scrap of paper she intends to keep, just to minimize the paperous stimuli.
The second issue is similar to a phobia, but to me, it seems the fear comes from a very real reason. As you saw on the index of my pages here, anything I look at I literally feel on my skin (usually on my face, the front of my torso, and the front of my arms) as well as in a "weighted" way inside my body (in any body part).
This synesthesia is rarely a problem for me, but at times it can be annoying. For instance, when I look at a crack on the sidewalk and I step on it, the foot with which I stepped on it feels a bit heavier until I forget about seeing the crack.
On the other hand, there are cases where when I get close to an object, I am nearly sent into a panic attack because of my sight touch synesthesia. If I get quite near to a very large, high, or deep object, such as an elephant, whale, deep pool or lake, I can feel the "largeness", and it is somewhat like a falling sensation, and because of this, I become nervous and undergo what amounts to a fight or flight response. The same happens when I get near to a picture of a very large, or, conversely, very small object, such as a microscopic insect, dinosaur, planet, galaxy, etc. It is not that I am innately scared of any of the objects in any way, but I feel them in such a way that my brain reacts badly to them because of their size. I do not fully understand why this is so and thus hope to have an opportunity to scientifically study this behavior in the future.
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