Professor Guy Leschziner (2022) The Man Who Tasted Words: Inside the Strange and Startling World of Our Senses.

Cogito ergo sum. The starting point of a million essays on philosophy. The duality of mind-body. Professor Guy Leschziner suggests it’s more complex, with what we think and who we are based on our sense of self is fallible and inconsistent based on a reality that isn’t really real, but a projection based on our internalised perceptions.  

Phew. Take a breather.

He’s a neurologist—he gets angry at ‘these morons, those who are anti-vaxxers and anti-scientists’—but he is saying that the world is far more complex than an Aristotelian belief in five senses. We are more than five. He shows that even tiny physical changes can have major impacts as the Covid virus shows in the way it altered people’s senses.

Anosmia, the inability to smell was, for example, a common trait of sufferers. We sample the world with our noses. But it’s more than that. He quotes Vladimir Nabokov. ‘Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.’

One of the first things we smell is our mother. My mum was a twenty-pack a day smoker. So I probably smoked around 1000 fags before starting school. Because we taste what we smell. When that chemical soup goes wonky our sense of taste can often go with it.

Joanne’s problem was a simple head cold (which I’ve also got now). It lingered but got worse. Antibiotics didn’t touch it. Specific smells made her nauseous. Perfumes and aftershaves were hell.

Around 7% of people with head injuries experience smell disorders. A loss of neurons that pass through the bone and translate the world.

Those suffering seizures often notice a smell such as burning rubber as part of an aura before electrical activity. Their body knows before their brain.

Some experience phantom smells, distorted vision, or tactile hallucinations.

There are some things you’d love to imagine away. Feeling pain. Paul was thirty four and he couldn’t imagine what pain felt like. He recalls asking for crisps before dinner, when he was a kid. His parents saying no. And he stood breaking his own fingers. Crack, crack, crack.

Or being told after losing his first tooth that the tooth fairy would give him a pound. He took a set of pliers to his teeth.

He didn’t grow up normally because his legs and bones had been broken so many times. He didn’t feel the pain but he was shorter than his peers and walked a limp. His condition was rare. A DNA mutation. But he found others out there like him. Their life experiences so much like his. What made it worse with his brother and sister had the same condition. Police and social services were brought in.   

James, in his sixties, has lived his life with synaesthesia. For him, words evoke distinct food flavours. His father’s name, Peter, tastes like tinned peas. His grandmother’s name, Mary, tastes like condensed milk. Place names also trigger tastes, creating a constant sensory overlay between language and flavour. He remembered learning his way around the London underground by how the words tasted.

Valeria realised, aged fourteen, her experience of music was different. When she plays piano, she sees vivid colours—bright oranges, purples, and yellows—and feels sensations like warmth on her face or an ocean breeze. Her synaesthesia merges sound, sight, and touch into a multisensory performance and experience. Up until then she thought everyone experienced the world in that way. She suggests many composers and artists have her condition. For her pure joy is an ache in her thumb from a piece of music that transcends time.

A blessing or a curse? Overwhelmingly, the latter. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6