The taste of words on the tip of the tongue

Synaesthesia is a rare familial condition involving a ‘crossing’ of the senses — for example, ordinary activities such as reading or listening to music may be perceived with different colours or tastes¹. Here we show that individuals who experience synaesthetic tastes that are elicited by words (who are known as lexical–gustatory synaesthetes) begin to taste an upcoming word before they can actually say it (that is, while it is still ‘on the tip of the tongue’). Taste sensations in these synaesthetes are therefore triggered by thinking of the word’s meaning, rather than by its sound or spelling. It is possible that conceptual thought may even be linked to perceptual experience in all of us.

Brain imaging² and inheritance patterns³ have established that synaesthesia is a genuine neurological phenomenon, but the psychological mechanisms that drive each manifestation are not yet fully understood. In the word–taste variant, pictures do not usually elicit a taste sensation without retrieval of the associated word⁴, and tastes are triggered by the corresponding food name (for example, mince taste by the word mince) as well as by words that share phonemes with that food name (such as prince)^4,5.