
With the exception of fishing, soccer and the Orthodox Church, few things are taken more seriously in Russia than Eurovision. The bejeweled women wear tight, knowing smiles. The men, who are almost all tanned, in sharply cut suits, grin with unconstrained glee.

The camera pans the laughing audience, cutting for a moment to a well-known actor-singer-writer-bodybuilder and then to one of the show’s M.C.s, Russia’s pop king, the also-bearded Philipp Kirkorov (widely assumed to be gay).

At one point she throws out a Hitler salute, a gesture that’s meant to evoke Austria, Conchita’s homeland. Vorobei is dressed in a sparkling gown, winking cheekily, scratching at her bearded face and swishing her lustrous wig around. Standing on a stage lit by gleaming chandeliers before an audience of Russia’s elite celebrities, the parodist Elena Vorobei sings to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” in a crude impersonation of Conchita Wurst, the Austrian drag queen who won the 2014 Eurovision song contest. The word hello, for instance, could taste like popcorn.On a cold, sunny New Year’s Eve in 2014, I am sitting at the edge of my king-size bed at the Four Seasons hotel in New York, munching through a stack of Wagyu beef slices and demolishing a bottle of pinot noir while watching a woman play a man playing a bearded woman on Russian state television. Also, a number of external stimuli can cause the condition, such as blindness, a stroke, or-no surprise here-psychedelic drugs.Īnd, in one of the condition’s rarest forms, lexical- gustatory synesthesia, words can actually evoke tastes, seemingly making it possible to taste a word. There are over sixty types of synesthesia and it seems to run in families (though only occurs in about 2–4% percent of the population). For some, this perception happens in their mind’s eye, while for others, it is projected externally. This is how it works: A synesthete consistently “sees” letters or numbers as a specific color the word tomorrow could evoke a bluish-green color, for example.

It is called color-graphemic synesthesia. The words derives from two Greek roots that mean “together” and “sensation.” What are some types of synesthesia?Ī common form of this condition has to do with letters and numbers. Synesthesia is “a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color.”Ī person who experiences synesthesia is called a synesthete. What is synesthesia?Īn involuntary neurological condition called synesthesia, which is also spelled synaesthesia, describes a version of this experience. Is it possible to see a taste? Or taste a word? The answer is yes, sort of.
