It's one of two major aspects of what I refer to as "my sortakinda synaesthesia-like thing". It's not textbook synaesthesia as I've read it described so far, because I don't actually see a flash of red when I taste or smell a red spice, but it's definitely a sensory-crossover thing because there is a pronounced "redness" (or "greenness" or "goldness", etc.) to the flavours.
I've never been quite certain how well the approach translates for people who don't perceive the flavours as having colours. It might simply be a matter of vocabulary... (English -- and I think most other human languages, but I'm not sure -- doesn't have anywhere near as many tools for describing smells and flavours as it does for colours and sounds. When I say "reddish" to describe a visual characteristic, everybody has a pretty good idea what I mean. But when I want to say, "in the same direction as what red pepper, coriander, paprika, and cinnamon have in common but cumin and mustard don't, and it's not the heat; you know, the opposite of jalapeno or serrano," well first of all that's pretty long and you have to play all those tastes in your head to figure out what the Hell I mean, and secondly you might come up with a different answer if we have different ideas of which components of a couple of those flavours are the relevant ones for that description.) So I wonder whether simply having the vocabulary for concisely describing "flavour space" would be enough to make what I do that way seem obvious to others, or whether I really am doing something unusual besides the colour-mapping.
(The other aspect of my sortakinda-syaesthesia-like thing is when I feel like I'm using a sense organ for a different sense than normally applies to it, such as when I "feel" a texture with my eyes, or "look at" something with my ears.)
(no subject)
I've never been quite certain how well the approach translates for people who don't perceive the flavours as having colours. It might simply be a matter of vocabulary... (English -- and I think most other human languages, but I'm not sure -- doesn't have anywhere near as many tools for describing smells and flavours as it does for colours and sounds. When I say "reddish" to describe a visual characteristic, everybody has a pretty good idea what I mean. But when I want to say, "in the same direction as what red pepper, coriander, paprika, and cinnamon have in common but cumin and mustard don't, and it's not the heat; you know, the opposite of jalapeno or serrano," well first of all that's pretty long and you have to play all those tastes in your head to figure out what the Hell I mean, and secondly you might come up with a different answer if we have different ideas of which components of a couple of those flavours are the relevant ones for that description.) So I wonder whether simply having the vocabulary for concisely describing "flavour space" would be enough to make what I do that way seem obvious to others, or whether I really am doing something unusual besides the colour-mapping.
(The other aspect of my sortakinda-syaesthesia-like thing is when I feel like I'm using a sense organ for a different sense than normally applies to it, such as when I "feel" a texture with my eyes, or "look at" something with my ears.)