Makes my Mouth Taste Spicy

3.5 Years: “That makes my mouth taste spicy.”

My daughter, like me, has a weird neurological set-up called synesthesia, which means that some “wires” in her brain cross and cause her to experience sensory input in unusual ways: for example, by “seeing” music or “tasting” colors. For me, it’s weak and doesn’t have a tremendous impact on my life. It’s just a matter of having strange physical sensations in response to certain sounds. For my daughter, it is, or at least was, a major part of her life.

I first learned that my daughter had strong synesthesia when she was three years old and developed a strong aversion to glitter. Anything glittery or sparkly caused her to cry out in pain and grab her mouth. She would cry, “That makes my mouth taste spicy!” and would grimace, as if eating a chili pepper, while I fetched her a glass of water and hid the offending image. We eventually had to completely eliminate glitter from our home, even modifying our Christmas tree to get rid of “spicy” ornaments.

Her synesthesia has grown weaker over the years, but it’s still there. Glitter doesn’t bother her anymore, but she still describes experiencing tactile and visual sensory input in unusual ways. Over time, I found out that synesthesia is very common among autistic children and tends to peak in the toddler years. Interestingly, since most autistic (and even neurotypical) children aren’t able to clearly articulate their experiences at two or three years of age, most of them never express how they’re processing senses. Had my daughter been nonverbal, I would have never known that glitter was the trigger for her distress. She would have simply begun crying or screaming and I would have no way of knowing why.

It’s an important lesson to be learned—not just about human neurology and the development of senses, but also about how things aren’t always what they seem, particularly for special-needs kids.