Riding the high of an orgasm is both physical and mental for most of us. It’s a moment of complete surrender, which can lead to indescribable pleasure, involuntary contractions, physical convulsions, wild sounds, and colors? Yes colors.
For those of us (raises hand) who see colors when we climax, orgasm synesthesia is a fireworks show. For me, the color phenomenon almost reminds me of the auras I experience before a migraine, without the pain. Sometimes bright hues of greens, oranges, whites and reds flash across my vision at the exact moment of pleasure.
A study, based on 572 people, determined that of the 1.2 percent of people with synesthesia (people who describe tastes in shapes, or sounds with smells) some of these persons can also see colors when they orgasm.
There hasn’t been a lot of study on people who see colors during orgasm, but according to sex researcher Nicole Prause, Ph.D.
“Shifts in brain state appear to occur to allow the orgasm experience to happen before the orgasm actually occurs,” Prause told Bustle.
“The entrainment of these brainwaves appears to exist for some time and resembles meditative states. Meditation itself, has, been associated with some of the sensory experiences being described in synesthesia.”
She describes that the brain may lose control over your senses, which causes vision and color to mix, “permitting the experience of some false sensory perception,” Prause told Bustle.
In a write-up for Smithsonian Mag, a study of people with orgasm synesthesia described the phenomenon that ranges in colors, depending on the pleasure the person is experiencing:
“Initial fantasy and desire triggered the colour orange for one woman. As excitement built for another participant, this went together with colours of increasing intensity. With excitement plateauing, one person described fog transformed into a wall. Orgasm was then described as the wall bursting, “ringlike structures … in bluish-violet tones.”
Sounds like an LSD trip more than sex right?
A smaller study of 19 people, published in Frontiers in Psychology, reported that people with orgasm synesthesia describe sex as more “spiritual,” “oceanic boundlessness, ” and “visionary restructuralization” than people who don’t have orgasm synesthesia.
