Synesthesia

So I'm driving home with my brother in the passenger seat last night and he mentions something about needing to see an optometrist. And I'm all like "huh? why?" He tells me about this conversation with his mother-in-law a few days ago; he told her he had a headache and "the spots were bigger than usual" or something like that. Of course, Lisa doesn't know what the hell he's talking about with the spots - it's something Trey's seen his entire life and just assumed it was a normal thing. And now he thinks maybe he should see an eye doctor.

Of course, I knew what it was right away - I asked if the dot patterns ever corresponded or got stronger with music. Turns out my brother probably has synesthesia, which is the most awesome medical condition I've ever heard of. It's something I've been fascinated with for years; finding out that Trey has it is surreal to say the least.

It's still probably best to get a confirmation that those spots actually are the result of synesthesia and not something more serious, but I'd bet everything in my bank account that's what it is. His descriptions are way to specific and correlate with the symptoms far too perfectly XD

Synesthesia is a harmless condition in which the sensory wires of the brain as it were have somehow gotten crossed - like in Trey's case, it appears to be vision and sound. He can "see" sound. There are at least 60 known variants though. Graphmeme-Color is the most common; it involves assigning colors, tastes, or personalities (or any combination of) to letters, numbers, days of the week, etc. So some synesthetes know what nine tastes like or find J to be a very angry letter. It varies from person to person, but that's the general idea.

He also mentioned that hearing the number 14 gives him a sour taste in his mouth which is rather odd - nothing else correspondes to any taste and reading the number is perfectly fine; only hearing it provokes the sensation. Being able to put a name to it also let some other things click in his head; Trey has always found Valentine's candy to be bitter, possibly due to that association with the number 14 XD

I've used the condition as a motif in my writing in the past, most notably in Sound Bubble, but in a few other places as well. If I got to chose my mental disorder, I'd go with this one XD