cross posted at body blog
Two psychologists in Edinburg have just published findings from a study they've conducted on people who experience "lexical-gustatory synaesthesia," which is to say that these people taste their words. It's a rare condition--the researchers have only been able to find a small number of people in Europe and US who have it--but man, is it fascinating.
The New York Times ran an article on it, but I think the science writer, in an attempt to play up the connections to Thanksgiving, gets it kind of wrong. The NYT article punningly places taste "in the ear of the beholder," but judging from the description of the study in Nature, the phenomenon under consideration is not about tasting words one hears, but tasting words one is about to utter: i.e. the sense of taste is activated in the process of conjuring a word. The researchers call this the tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT for short), and the upshot has to do with meaning-making on the sensory level--perhaps, the researchers tantalizingly suggest, for all of us.