Whether the sensation is projected or associated, it is a complex food flavor (e.g., minced beef and gravy) rather than a pure taste (e.g., bitter) and can involve texture, temperature, and other multisensory components (e.g., “jail” tastes of cold hard bacon for synesthete J.I.W. We will refer to these manifestations as “projector” and “associator” forms of LG synesthesia, respectively, taking these terms from related differences found in color-experiencing synesthetes (see Dixon et al., 2004). are automatic and immediate “thought associations” between the inducing word and a food type (e.g., the word “dean” evokes the precise and consistent notion of minced beef in gravy, but nothing is tasted in the mouth). In contrast, the flavors of synesthete S.K.M. Synesthete J.I.W., for example, experiences LG synesthesia as if he were tasting veridical flavors in the mouth, with each word being like a droplet of taste on the tongue (Ward & Simner, 2003). For example, other synesthetes might “see” colored photisms in the visual field triggered by listening to music or reading (e.g., Dixon, Smilek, & Merikle, 2004 Ward, Huckstep, & Tsakanikos, 2006 see Simner & Hubbard, 2013, for a review).Ĭase reports (e.g., Gendle, 2007 Ramachandra, 2016 Richer, Beaufils, & Poirier, 2011 Ward & Simner, 2003) and small-group studies (e.g., Ward et al., 2005) have shown two ways in which LG synesthesia can be experienced. LG synesthesia is just one of a number of different synesthesias recorded in the neuropsychological and medical literature, all of which cause unusual additional sensations and can affect multiple senses. These flavors have been objectively verified in behavioral tasks (e.g., Ward & Simner, 2003 Ward et al., 2005) and tied to unusual neurological activity in the taste centers of synesthetes’ brains (e.g., the insula Jones et al., 2011). And the word “society” tastes of onions (e.g., Ward & Simner, 2003).
The name “Phillip” fills his mouth with bitter oranges. hears the word “audience,” his mouth is flooded with the flavor of tinned peas. In some cases, people with LG synesthesia taste every single word they read, speak, hear, or even think about (e.g., Ward, Simner, & Auyeung, 2005). People with LG synesthesia (known as LG synesthetes) experience floods of flavor in the mouth or intrusive food-related thoughts whenever they hear certain sounds, especially words. Lexical–gustatory (LG) synesthesia is an intriguing neurological condition in which sounds induce phantom flavors (e.g., Ramachandra, 2016 Ward & Simner, 2003).
We suggest that our novel diagnostic for LG synesthesia has unprecedented benefits in its automated and objective scoring, its ease of use for participants and researchers, its short testing time, and its online platform. 2) has greater discriminatory power with a threshold cutoff. Although both our methods discriminated synesthetes from controls, our second test (Exp. We tested the largest sample of self-declared LG synesthetes studied to date and used receiver operating characteristic analysis to assess the discriminant power of our tests. 1) or by specifying their basic component tastes (sweet, salty, bitter, etc.). We present data from two versions of our diagnostic test, in which synesthetes report their synesthetic flavors either from a hierarchical set of food categories (Exp. Here we present a novel, automated, online consistency test, which can be administered in just 30 min in order to instantly and objectively verify LG synesthesia.
Although this test reliably dissociates synesthetes from nonsynesthetes, it suffers from practical and methodological limitations. Their flavor associations are significantly more consistent over time than are those of controls (who are asked to invent associations by intuition and to recall them from memory). The condition is usually verified in individuals by obtaining verbal descriptions of their word–flavor associations on more than one occasion, separated by several months. For example, the word “society” might flood the mouth of an LG synesthete with the flavor of fried onion. Lexical–gustatory (LG) synesthesia is an intriguing neurological condition in which individuals experience phantom tastes when hearing, speaking, reading, or thinking about words.
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