I don’t think this short, “Synesthesia” by the directing duo Terri Timely (Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasey), really gives you an impression — exaggerated or not — of what synethesia is actually like, as Josh Rothman of the Boston Globe suggests in the post that brought this short to my attention, but it’s an awful lot of fun.
Synesthesia is “the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body,” or a jumbling of senses. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, saw letters take on colors, and physicist Richard Feynman would see colored equations. My own brush with synesthesia (and only, that I recall) was brought on by psilocybin mushrooms back in college, and I saw dancing colors in the air, sort of like a small-scale Northern Lights, connected to the music that was playing in the background.