Having synaesthesia is a lot like being a twin – we don’t know any different | Life and style

Hélène Besgrove: My twin sister, Kirsty, and I have a very similar experience of synesthesia in that our experiences of sounds, tastes, smells, words, noises and movements are very visual. Whether it is a name, a personality, a sound or a smell, everything has a color and texture in our minds.

What’s interesting is that the colors and textures that Kirsty and I see can be very different. When I drink a glass of chardonnay I get these custard oil swirls, but Kirsty might describe the same wine as hazy or blob. It’s the same with people’s personalities, which we both see as a colorful, textured aura around that person. My best friend Jenn’s personality is poopy brown, which she hates. To Kirsty, Jenn’s personality is yellow and blue with a brown stripe down the middle.

We always found it very shocking to hear everyone’s colors. On a family road trip to Queensland when we were about five years old, we spent a few hours with our mother asking “what color is the word Queensland? What color is the word apple?”. The three of us saw different colors and textures of each and spent hours arguing over who was right. Our father and our brother said nothing. For years we assumed it was just their boy brains.

We were 19 when we first discovered there was a word for our experiences – and that they were genetic rather than sexist. I was in the second year of my communications degree at Macquarie University, on a radio production course. The radio interviewee described a piece of music being played as being really silvery. I couldn’t help but let slip that it was a very strong yellow. The radio narrator went on to explain that it was a phenomenon called synesthesia that caused these color associations. I left the class and immediately called my mum and Kirsty. We were all fascinated.

Around the same time, an academic friend in the psychology department told me that they were looking for synesthetes to participate in a research project on this phenomenon. Kirsty and I were put in touch with Anina Rich, the cognitive neuroscientist leading the research, who was particularly interested in us because we were twins. Over the next few years, his study helped us realize that we had more than just auditory-visual synesthesia.

Kirsty and I completed our research at Macquarie University 15 years ago, when we were in our twenties, but we are making new discoveries about our synaesthesia every day. Just a few months ago, I went wine tasting with a friend and realized that not everyone has such a zesty taste for certain wines.

I was working for the Nespresso coffee brand, and one year I accidentally won the company’s Australian blind coffee tasting competition. Without really trying, I scored 10 out of 10 every round and ended up being transported to the grand finals in Switzerland to compete against the top 20 tasters in the world. All of my fellow finalists had studied coffee intensively to help them differentiate between different blends. I just walked in and I could immediately differentiate myself. I realize now that it’s because my synesthesia gives me more sensory stimuli, which makes it easier to distinguish. I guess that’s why I love tasting wine and coffee so much. I find it so nuanced and interesting. This also makes a great party trick.

Kirsty Neal: It’s hard to know how much my synesthesia has affected my work as a doctor, because I’ve never known life without it. But it certainly gave me an excellent memory, which is helpful when much of my job requires quick memorization of facts.

Helen and I were both incredibly good at spelling from the age of three and could easily say words backwards. I can now see that this is probably because letters and words have extra meaning for us than for most people. The word is right there in our minds. I did great on exams because I could pull up the page in my head and see all the notes in their different highlighted colors. When a rare disease arises during my work as a patient, I can immediately get facts about it because I can see the textbook, conference, or place where I heard about it.

My mirror touch synesthesia (where a person feels a physical or emotional sensation on their own body when they see another person being touched) allows me to visualize and often feel a patient’s pain or symptoms. When I see a patient with a broken bone, I literally feel pain in my legs and tingling in my legs. When someone says they feel burning pain, my mind immediately goes to my own experience of burning pain. I can visualize my entire nerve. It is yellow and fiery, with ragged edges all the way down to the toes.

Helen’s feet are tingling right now, just hearing me talk about it. I don’t know how much of it depends on my personality or my synesthesia, but I probably end up spending too much time with my patients because of it.

The only time synesthesia becomes a problem is when two words are the same color. Michael and William are both dark reddish brown to me, so I confuse people with those names all the time. And neither Helen nor I can do our left and right because the concepts of left and right are different colors from the words “left” and “right.” For me, the word “left” is yellow but the concept of left is skin color. If we are driving and someone tells us to go left, we should both ask them to point at us. We know what the word is, but we have to manually process the meaning.

Learning about synesthesia has been fascinating. Nearly 20 years ago, I was talking to Anina about how the taste of vinegar is like a floating purple cloud, and she pointed out that it might well come from my association with packets of purple salt and vinegar chips – it’s a hypothesis her team evaluated in their research. This made me wonder if the colors in my alphabet came from the letters hanging on my kindergarten classroom wall. Helen and I were in different classes, maybe that’s why hers are different.

Synesthesia is a bit like sitting in a chair. Unless you tap into that feeling and say, “Okay, there’s this pressure around my butt and my legs,” you’re not actively processing that information. It’s the same thing with my synesthesia: I don’t tap into it and say “it’s orange” or “it’s blue” unless someone asks me.

People often ask Helen and I what it’s like to have synesthesia and the truth is that it’s the same as when they ask me what it’s like to be a twin. This may or may not have given us an advantage on certain things without us realizing it. But for us, it’s just normal. We don’t know anything different.