Do You Taste Words? 🧠

The Strange Neuroscience of Lexical-Gustatory Synesthesia (6min Read)

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TL;DR Summary

• Some people literally taste words — it’s called lexical-gustatory synesthesia.

• Their brains cross-wire language regions with taste circuits, so words like “lemon” actually taste sour.

• Scientists don’t know exactly why it happens, but theories range from memory-boosting quirks to “metaphor turned literal.”

• Life with this brain is a mix of delight (flavorful conversations, sticky memories) and disaster (gross word-flavors you can’t escape).

• Synesthesia reminds us the brain isn’t a neat filing cabinet — it’s a messy, creative remix machine.

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Do You Taste Words?

I’m not talking about how “brownies” makes you want to raid the kitchen.

I mean, when you hear the word brownies, do you actually taste chocolate on your tongue?

If you just thought “Uh… no?” congratulations, you’re like 99.8% of people.

But for a tiny fraction of humans, the answer is yes. And no, they’re not faking it for attention.

This rare phenomenon is called lexical-gustatory synesthesia, which is a fancy way of saying: words hit the taste buds, not just the ears.

For today’s topic, I’m returning to the roots of this blog and diving into a perplexing neuroscience phenomenon.

It’s been too long, so let’s dive into the neuroscience of lexical-gustatory synesthesia!

What Even Is Synesthesia?

Before we zoom in on tasting words, let’s back up.

Synesthesia, in general, is when the senses get their wires crossed in ways most people don’t.

The word comes from the Greek for “joined sensation,” and that’s exactly what it is, one input automatically triggers another.

The most famous version is grapheme-color synesthesia, where letters or numbers are permanently tied to colors.

Imagine never seeing a “Tuesday” without it being neon green in your mind, or the number 4 always glowing deep red, no matter what font it’s written in.

Then there’s chromesthesia, where sounds trigger colors.

A trumpet blast might explode in gold across your mental canvas, while a piano note ripples in indigo.

Many musicians have it and swear it shapes their creativity.

There are other flavors, too:

• Spatial-sequence synesthesia, where time has a physical shape, like months orbiting around your body.

• Mirror-touch synesthesia, where watching someone get tapped on the arm makes you feel the tap on your own skin.

• And yes, lexical-gustatory synesthesia, where words don’t just sound like something… They taste like something.

What all of these have in common is that they’re not voluntary, they’re consistent, and they blur the neat little boundaries we like to imagine exist between our senses.

Most of us take it for granted that vision is vision, sound is sound, taste is taste. But for synesthetes, the borders are porous. Their brains remix reality by default.

Now that you’ve got the lay of the land, let’s dive into one of the rarest and weirdest versions of all: tasting words.

The Neuroscience of Lexical-Gustatory Synesthesia

Let’s talk neuroscience, peeps.

Normally, language is handled by a few key players in your left hemisphere.

Broca’s area helps string words together, Wernicke’s area unpacks meaning, and the angular gyrus helps link what you hear and what you read to the bigger concepts behind them.

Taste, on the other hand, lives in the insula, buried deep in the cortex, and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is where flavor meets smell, emotion, and reward.

In most brains, these systems are like polite neighbors.

They nod across the street, maybe share a wave, but that’s it.

In synesthetes, though?

The fences are down, the wine is flowing, and suddenly the language neighborhood and the taste neighborhood are throwing a block party together.

So the word lemon doesn’t just register as “citrus fruit.”

It literally sparks the same sour-processing neurons that fire when you bite into a lemon wedge.

Which, yes, means some poor souls are stuck tasting metal every single time the word “blood” comes up in a conversation.

This begs the question…

Why Would a Brain Do This?

You’re probably wondering: why? Why on earth would a brain decide, “Hey, let’s make Wednesdays taste like marshmallows”?

The truth is, nobody knows for sure. But there are a few ideas floating around.

One is that it’s basically a metaphor turned up to eleven.

Humans already describe feelings with taste words all the time: sweet victory, bitter truth, sour mood.

Maybe in synesthetes, the brain just shrugs and says, “Why stop at metaphor when I can make it literal?”

Another possibility is that it helps with memory.

If every name, word, or day of the week comes with a flavor tag, you’re not forgetting it anytime soon.

“Rachel tastes like raspberries” is a lot stickier in your brain than “Her name is Rachel.”

Or maybe it’s just a developmental quirk.

When you’re little, your brain is massively interconnected, and part of growing up is pruning away the extra wiring so things run more efficiently.

Maybe synesthetes just… didn’t prune as much, leaving these wild crossovers behind.

And of course, it could also be one of those things evolution didn’t bother to fix because it wasn’t hurting anything.

The brain is full of happy accidents like that.

Bottom line is, scientists are not exactly sure yet, but these are some of our ideas!

The Pros & Cons

Now, before you start wishing you had this ability, let’s talk about the pros and cons.

On the plus side, imagine how colorful life becomes when every conversation is basically a tasting menu.

People with lexical-gustatory synesthesia often have insanely good memory because words and names don’t just float away; they’re grounded in flavor.

And if you’re creative, this is gold. Writers, poets, musicians… they sometimes describe synesthesia as their secret sauce for originality.

But there’s a flip side.

Imagine you’re trying to enjoy an action movie trailer and every time the narrator says “blood,” your mouth floods with the taste of pennies.

Or you’re reading a menu and instead of just imagining the dishes, you’re force-fed thirty clashing flavors all at once.

Delightful? Sometimes. Overwhelming? Often.

And then there are the straight-up gross pairings. No one wants their coworker’s name to taste like sour milk.

The point is, it’s not always a superpower. Sometimes it’s just… annoying.

What It Feels Like (If You Don’t Have It)

Okay, let me try to put you in their shoes.

Think about the smell of buttered popcorn. Got it?

Now imagine that every single time someone says “Thursday,” that smell slams into your nose whether you want it or not.

Doesn’t matter if you’re in a meeting, in class, or on a date…

Thursday shows up, and so does the popcorn. You don’t get to choose, and you can’t turn it off.

That’s what lexical-gustatory synesthesia is like.

The flavors are automatic, consistent, and inescapable.

It’s not “oh, that word reminds me of cinnamon rolls.”

It’s “Nope, cinnamon roll in my mouth, right now.”

Test Yourself

I would be surprised if you’ve gotten this far and didn’t already know whether you have this or not; I’d imagine it’d be pretty obvious.

Nevertheless, here’s a test!

Close your eyes and sit with these words:

• Cinnamon.

• Laptop.

• Wednesday.

• Marshmallow.

If you actually tasted one of them, welcome to the synesthesia club.

If not, well, you’re running on the standard operating system.

Which is fine. But admit it… Part of you is jealous.

The Big Picture

The brain isn’t a tidy machine.

It’s a messy kitchen, with pots bubbling over and spices sneaking into the wrong dishes.

Synesthesia is one of the clearest reminders that our senses aren’t sealed off from each other; they’re constantly sharing, crossing, and remixing.

I love researching and learning more about synesthesia for this exact reason; it’s a reminder that our brains are complex networks, not simple little regions like textbooks suggest.

I hope you enjoyed this topic as much as me!

I like writing on interesting neuroscience topics every so often, so expect more in the future!

Until then… Live Heroically 🧠

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Supporting Research

• Cytowic, R. E. (2002). Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses. MIT Press.

• Ward, J., & Simner, J. (2003). Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia: linguistic and conceptual factors. Cognition, 89(3), 237–261.

• Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Psychophysical investigations into the neural basis of synaesthesia. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 268(1470), 979–983.

• Simner, J., & Carmichael, D. A. (2015). Is synaesthesia a dominantly female trait? Cognitive Neuroscience, 6(2–3), 68–76.

• Cytowic, R. E., & Eagleman, D. M. (2009). Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. MIT Press.

• Simner, J., & Ward, J. (2006). The taste of words on the tip of the tongue. Nature, 444(7118), 438.

• Hubbard, E. M., & Ramachandran, V. S. (2005). Neurocognitive mechanisms of synesthesia. Neuron, 48(3), 509–520.

• Jones, J. A., & Jacoby, L. L. (2001). Feature binding through lexical-gustatory synesthesia. Perception, 30(5), 681–687.

• Simner, J. (2007). Beyond perception: synesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(1), 23–29.