The Man Who Tastes Time

Hamrick Walters, originally from Olympia, Washington, is rare among synesthetes. The 19-year-old college student can taste time.

“It's something like tasting the passing of time. I found a book I used to play with during visits to my grandmother. When I uncovered it and thought about that time, my hands, arms, stomach, diaphragm area, and tongue at once lit up with a strange sensation. It doesn't taste like anything I've ever tasted before, and I doubt there is a dish or beverage out there that has this taste. It has a murky brown look in my mind, as if I've descended into the depths of a sea of velvet. But, this isn't always the same. Sometimes the colors change to any number of other shades, and the taste itself ranges from a dullness to a horrid, putrid taste whose taste is so alien, I have to wonder where it comes from.”

Pressed for the closest thing it might taste like, he said, “industrial, like fluorescent lights.”

In addition, Hamrick feels that he is not immersed in time, but rather walking alongside it.

The concept of time sometimes triggers synesthesia – some synesthetes see days of the week around them spatially, like wheels, or in uphill linear forms or other shapes other than clocks or calendars, for example. But that is another matter altogether and more common. “I can’t taste the concept of time,” Hamrick explained to me recently. “Some synesthetes can taste concepts, and while on occasion I can (honesty is currently chocolate and looks like a giant church bell with a bark-like texture), time is simply transparent egg whites that bend in on themselves over and over again into infinity.”

Hamrick’s experience reminds me of Marcel Proust in Remembrances of Things Past. Famously, he wrote how the taste of a madeleine crumb one day spontaneously brought back memories of visiting his Aunt Léonie in Combray:

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

Hamrick’s mother experiences synesthesia. The Talking Heads song “Seen and Not Seen” looks to her like rotating five-point red diamonds, he says. But to Hamrick the song is a gray and blue bubble in front of a blue background – in shades so lovely it’s his favorite song to “watch.”

“Music stimulates this feeling (of tasting music) very well. I can taste music, yes, but tasting time in music is a very different experience. I can distinguish them easily. A song I heard on the radio last fall tasted like dish soap, and that was all – the song and the taste and nothing else. Tasting time in music stretches on and on, and is a 3D feeling. I heard ‘All I Need,’ a Radiohead song, a lot when it came out in 2008. After revisiting the album which ‘All I Need’ is on (‘In Rainbows’), I tasted the song again after a six year hiatus. The emotions I felt, the scents I smelled during that time, and where I physically was were contained in the taste. It was a sensory jackpot: I could see, hear, taste, feel, and smell the song. For a brief moment, total transcendence is achieved. It's part of why music is such an important thing to me.”

In addition to this most unique experience, Hamrick has several other forms of synesthesia. He sees music. “Instead of solid colors and nothing else, I see colored textures and landscapes. It feels easy to access other worlds with synesthesia. Seeing a painting is very different than the landscapes I see with music. Paintings are more concrete.” And he also assigns gender and personalities to numbers, letters and objects and sees auras.

“I have been known to tell people ‘your eyes match your personality so well!’

That usually confuses them, but some people understand.”

Hamrick is turning 20 next month and is a student at Eastern Kentucky University, studying music and sociology. “I reside in a small Appalachian town. I'm looking for a job at the moment. I live in a rich world within, and to be frank am mostly preoccupied with that. Not saying it's ideal, but events lately have made me retreat into myself a lot. I love music and compose ballads for piano, I read here and there, and enjoy observing life. Other than those three things, there isn't that much. I'm interested in community development, visual art, and music for a career. Nor sure how to blend those three at present. One might call my life boring, which, of course, is laughable. “

When Hamrick experiences blissful feelings – the joy of a new love affair or another of life’s pleasures, he sees “a blue highway.” I asked him to describe this happy place which appears in his mind’s eye and envelops him.

It looks like the diagram to the left to him and this is his associated free verse:

Dude. You wanted to know, so here you go.

Light blue is one of the most frequently occurring colors.

I see it everywhere.

It started almost 15 years ago.

We lived in Georgia.

Peace Corps neighbors from Minnesota.

So like, you know the way movies always make life

Seem better than it actually is?

I don't remember much about my neighbors, but

I like to imagine them having that

Too-good-to-be-rue life. Light blue is a

ubiquitous color as I imagine their dining area,

bay window and all.

There's also Jack and Rose. A film.

Lots of blue sky. Watched the last half, the

House burning down in coastal Ireland, with my

Mother. Light blue is walking through JC Penney,

fantasizing about owning comforters and sheets that

Weren't 20 years old, blissfully unaware at that time the

fact that those same sheets and blankets were contributing

to the demise of all humankind. Sheets. Me and someone in them.

A playful day spent under them, with wood floors, while it

rained outside, porcelain coffee cups, books, in a small house

somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Finally light blue is

my dystopian love story. I was at a Dairy Queen one time with my grandmother, hating the

fact that I needed to eat to survive

And got a sandwich and a Blizzard. I paid meticulous attention

to the syrups in the Blizzard as they were being dispensed

Into the soft serve. I won't get into the agricultural implications.

I saw a young man's arm. He was looking at me from across the

Restaurant. Heaven knows why, he was way hotter than me. I saw the veins going up

and down his arms, and this dystopian love story came true. Humans in an inhuman

world trying to make it human. Indeed. There are light blue hexagons in my grim

predictions of the future. But also so much light. That with these hands and arms I can

go forth. That's what light blue means to me.