A taste for sounds

> A rare medical condition gives James Wannerton the ability to experience whatever he hears as a mouthful of food

How has it affected your life? “Just like the ability to smell or hear, my synaesthesia has affected my life in many ways.

“As a child, I used to choose friends according to the synaesthetic flavour of their names. Later in life, I used the same technique when it came to girlfriends.

“The emotional tag that comes with synaesthesia is quite a powerful one.

“If I don’t like the synaesthetic taste of something or someone, then I won’t like it or them and that feeling of dislike isn’t easy to shake off.

“It’s a sensory and very personal inner feeling that stays with you.

“There are a million other ways my synaesthesia affects my life, whether it be deciding what to have to eat or which particular TV programme to watch.”

How does it affect your relationship with food? “The tastes and textures I constantly experience means that I don’t get hunger pangs as I understand them. I get cravings for food, but those are different and easy to control. “This constant, extrasensory feeding does mean that I have to be reminded to eat real food, otherwise, I’d probably starve!”

Do food words taste like the food they describe? “The vast majority do. The word ‘cheese’ does indeed have the taste and texture of cheese. The word ‘potato’ tastes of potato.

“There are exceptions though. The food word ‘oyster’ has the very strong taste and texture of soft, thin chocolate.”

Is it just words that affect you? “No, all sounds have a synaesthetic taste and texture. Researchers have tested me with made-up words and non-word sounds and they all trigger a taste.

“It’s purely the sound of the word and nothing to do with meaning or context, which is why certain foreign languages can cause me problems.

“I started learning French and German at school. French gave me a horrible overtaste of runny egg, but German tasted nice, like marmalade. I also get tastes from colours.”

If you could switch your synaesthesia off, would you? “No. It is a fundamental part of how I perceive the world around me and I couldn’t imagine that world without all the flavours that come with every sound. “I have met and spoken to hundreds of synaesthetes and nearly all of them consider their extra perceptions as a gift rather than a curse, and they just roll with and enjoy the experience.” – The Independent