So what’s the deal with synesthesia on TikTok? Harrison says when he first met synesthetes four decades ago, they were reluctant to talk about their condition because they feared ridicule. “That seems to have changed,” he says. “Now it’s a very sexy thing to be a synesthete.”
Of course this could tempt clout-chasers to lie, but SynesthesiaTok may simply be self-reinforcing: The hashtag raises awareness of the condition, which in turn allows more and more people to learn that they have it. Sarah Kraning is an 29-year-old artist and auditory-visual synesthete from Minneapolis who only discovered the name for her experiences in a college psychology class. “It was a very emotional, heavy-impact moment for me,” she says.
When she was a child, Kraning stopped discussing her senses after friends and family laughed or seemed confused. Kraning sees colors, textures, and patterns…
