Imagine someone says an ordinary word — chair, Tuesday, message — and suddenly a flavor appears in your mouth. Not because the word reminds you of food or because you are hungry, but because the word itself produces a taste. For a small number of people, this is part of everyday life.
The phenomenon is called lexical-gustatory synesthesia, a rare form of synesthesia in which words automatically trigger sensations of taste. Some people experience these sensations when they hear words; others when they read, speak, or even silently think them. The tastes may be experienced in the mouth, on the tongue, or even in the throat, and they can be every bit as complicated as real tastes and smells.
Nor are these necessarily vague sensations of sweet or salty. They can be extraordinarily specific. One extensively studied man experienced the word blue as “inky.” Researchers studying him found that particular speech sounds could be associated with particular tastes and that the connections between his words and flavors followed recognizable patterns rather than appearing at random.
Surely they are making it up?
There is an obvious problem when scientists study experiences that exist entirely inside someone else’s head. If you tell me that Tuesday tastes like mashed potatoes, I cannot taste your Tuesday. I cannot put a thermometer in your mouth and measure it, and there is certainly no machine with a dial marked MASHED POTATO: YES/NO. So how can anyone know whether lexical-gustatory synesthesia is real?
Researchers found a clever way to approach the problem: they tested consistency. In one study, a woman was presented with 806 English words and 222 plausible nonsense words and asked to describe any taste produced by each one. Three months later, she was given the words again, and her responses were highly consistent. Researchers also asked people without synesthesia to invent and remember their own word-taste combinations. Although they could remember some of them, their performance could not adequately explain the synesthete’s pattern of responses.
Similar results have appeared in other cases. One woman’s word-taste associations remained significantly more consistent over a nine-month period than associations invented by people without synesthesia. Even more remarkable was a man whose unusual tastes had first been recorded in the 1970s. When scientists found and retested him 27 years later, many of his associations were still there.
None of this allows us to climb inside another person’s consciousness and taste what they taste. It does, however, make a complex collection of word-taste associations that remains stable for decades considerably harder to dismiss as somebody simply making things up.
Does Tuesday taste the same to everyone?
No. There is no secret synesthetic menu in which Monday tastes like chocolate, Tuesday like potatoes, and Wednesday like chicken soup. The associations are highly personal, and two people with lexical-gustatory synesthesia may experience completely different tastes for the same word. Some words may produce no taste at all.
What makes the phenomenon remarkable is not agreement between different people but consistency within the same person. Your Tuesday may taste nothing like mine, but if your Tuesday tastes like mashed potatoes today, there is a good chance that it will still taste like mashed potatoes years from now.
But why that taste?
This may be the most interesting mystery of all. Why should one particular arrangement of sounds produce the taste of bacon, chocolate, soup, or something else entirely? Research suggests that at least some of these associations may develop while children are learning language.
In one extensively studied case, researchers found relationships between the sounds contained in words and the foods those words evoked. Meaning mattered too. The man’s word-taste system appeared to have been shaped by learned language and concepts rather than being a simple case of two senses accidentally becoming crossed.
One possible developmental explanation is that food words initially become linked with the actual experience of those foods. As a child’s vocabulary grows, words that sound similar to food words may begin activating related tastes as well. If that explanation is correct, the strange internal menu may have been quietly assembling itself while the child was learning to talk.
The taste can arrive before the word
Then researchers discovered something even stranger. Almost everyone knows the frustrating feeling of having a word on the tip of the tongue. You know the word and may even be able to picture the person or object you are trying to name, remember where you encountered it, or know what letter it begins with, yet the word itself refuses to appear.
In 2006, researchers Julia Simner and Jamie Ward realized that this ordinary failure of memory offered an extraordinary opportunity. What would happen if someone with lexical-gustatory synesthesia knew the meaning of a word but temporarily could not retrieve the word itself? Would the taste disappear too?
Apparently not. They found that synesthetes could sometimes experience the taste associated with a word before they were actually able to retrieve and say that word. The taste, in other words, got there first.
The finding suggested that the sensation did not necessarily require a person to hear the word’s sounds or see its letters. Thinking about the meaning of the missing word could sometimes be enough to trigger its taste. Somewhere inside the brain, enough information about the missing word was available to produce the flavor, yet the person still could not retrieve the word itself. The mouth, in a sense, knew before the tongue could tell.
A private world inside the ordinary one
Most of us move through language without ever considering how peculiar it really is. Black marks on a page become sounds; sounds become words; and words summon people who are not present, places we have never visited, things that happened decades ago, and things that have never happened at all. For people with lexical-gustatory synesthesia, another layer is added to this already remarkable process.
Their words can be sweet or bitter. They can taste of meat, fruit, soup, candy, or something much harder to describe. Perhaps stranger still, a person can live with these sensations for years before realizing that everyone else is not experiencing language in the same way. One woman studied by researchers said she was about seven years old when she realized that her experience was different from other people’s.
For most of us, Tuesday is simply Tuesday. For someone else, it may taste of chocolate, roast potatoes, or something entirely different, and years from now Tuesday may still taste exactly the same. Perhaps that is what makes lexical-gustatory synesthesia so fascinating: it reminds us that although we appear to inhabit the same world, the world each of us experiences is created, at least in part, inside our own brain.
And occasionally, that brain serves words with a side order of bacon.
“The brain does not merely show us the world. Sometimes it adds a little flavor of its own.” — Stanley Armani
The People Who Can Taste Words was authored by Stanley Armani. Stanley writes about the brain, learning, and the hidden patterns that shape how we think. His work explores the strange, the hopeful, and the extraordinary sides of human potential.
