Synesthesia

benbradley said:

It sounds like it would really help to read this book! He writes about having had tantrums and crying when he was a small child due to very similar things.

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I can relate to this.

I had no idea what it was until I read these threads. 97%

KTC said:

@ THINKER : Do you have a fascination with the number 5? I've had a lifelong fascination with this number. I call it the number of the universe, actually. I know it holds the secrets of the entire universe. I wonder if my obsession with it has anything to do with synesthesia? I see it as vibrant red too.

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For me it's 7. And seven is violet.

Some of the associations I have are shapes or, for lack of a better term, certain types of motion--kinetic sensations. And some tastes have colors.

I didn't realize it counted as synesthesia if you only had some synesthetic associations--like if only some numbers have colors. That's neat.

KTC said:

I could sleep through math and still get high nineties. Patterns are a true obsession for me. They actually get my OCD in gear sometimes.

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I'm the same way...patterns are an obsession...and I'm OCD. VERY OCD.

Don't have the same obsession with the number 5, but I do have weird obsessions with numbers. Go figure.

Author/neurologist Oliver Sacks has written about synesthesia, sorry I'm not sure which of his books but it should be a quick google. I recommend him for all things neurological, he's an excellent writer.

thethinker42 said:

I'm the same way...patterns are an obsession...and I'm OCD. VERY OCD.

Don't have the same obsession with the number 5, but I do have weird obsessions with numbers. Go figure.

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I've started watching that new Obsessed show on A&E. I think I have to stop...because it's actually triggering me!

That syn challenge was, well, not a very good test. Quick, yes, but misleading. There's debate over whether the bouba/kiki thing is actually syn-related, and the way the results are phrased really bugs me. Syn is a stimulus-response phenonmenon, and even if a person only has one syn response, then that person does have syn, not a 'percent chance' of having it.

A better test (though a lot longer) is the synesthesia battery. How long it will be depends on how many syn types you check off that you think you might have, but if you're interested in taking it you should block out a good half-hour at least. You get clear results showing how you responded to each stimulus, and I think it even records how long it takes you to click on your responses (it scores less-synesthetic the longer a response takes, since a true syn response is instant and it should only take a second to click the mouse, but if someone's trying to fake out the system and either remember some memorized colors or look them up on a sheet they wrote out, that would take longer). Not all the tests are timed though...it's been a while since I took these but I remember some timed and some not.

The battery does have some drawbacks - you can only choose one color for your response (annoying when you have a letter that's two colors at the same time) and you can't describe any texture or taste etc. your letters/numbers might have. I'm not sure how the test handles letter/number personalities, since I don't have that type, but I remember a long list of possible types and that one might be there too.

My husband just read a book called The Frog that Croaked Blue, which is an overview by a scientist of case studies of different kinds of synesthesia. He really enjoyed it--it's a short but apparently very informative book!

I'll probably be reading and reviewing it on my Twitter in the next week or so...

Check out: Breathing in Colour by Clare Jay - she was my Creative Writing tutor for the first year of my Diploma. It's about a girl with synaesthesia. Published by Piatkus, ISBN 978 0 7499 2978 7. www.piatkus.co.uk It's a very well-researched novel, and not "facts in your face" narrative, if you know what I mean!

I posted this a while back... I was data entering a string of numbers and got a strong mental flash of patriotic flag-waving imagery.

I'd just entered 1-5-1-5-3 = white-red-white-red-blue.

My neurologist told me that my brain is wired as if I am on a constant LSD trip.

Music, math, speech, writing, everything has its own palettes and colors. I have thrown books across the room because the prose was too brown. I will turn the radio off if the music looks too muddy. When I was a child my violin teacher told me once I had perfect pitch. Not even close. I would tune my violin until the A string made the correct shade of orange-red.

I can hear a song and play it back on an instrument, just from remembering what it looks like. People's voices all look different. My chemistry professor's voice looked like cornflakes. My husband's voice looks like liquid sand but dry not wet. Alan Rickman's voice looks like mercury.

Each language has its own palette. Russian is primarily reds, purples, and whites. It looks like watercolor. French is mostly strong, saturated blues and greens. Spanish has a lot of yellows and browns, English, a lot of browns reds and greens. German and English look a lot alike. I remember talking to one gentleman, and I couldn't understand what he was saying in German because his voice was too red and it interfered with the words.

I failed my chemistry class. When working formulas, the chemical symbols and the mathematical symbols came from different palettes, and interfered with each other. Yellow white with a little brown swirl could mean carbon dioxide, or it could mean 1+3. The patterns in those problems were constantly interrupted. I love the periodic table though. It's a giant spiral with hydrogen in the center, and the rest radiating out. It looks like a galaxy.

Canotila, that's fascinating! Have you tried writing about it?

Red.Ink.Rain said:

Does anyone have it?

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Yes

I have always had colours for numbers, letters, weekdays, months. (Grapheme-colour synaesthesia, if you want the official name.) And words in general. I used to think that everyone knew the colours, and that teachers deliberately had alphabet charts in the wrong ones just to be annoying. And I have a few words which have particular tastes as well. The name 'Stella' tastes like tunafish, and 'Dwayne' tastes like mothballs. My partner's last name has a very deep rich sweet taste.

There's a reasonable amount of evidence for synaesthesia being a genetic thing. My sister has it too, although hers is way better than mine. She not only sees colours for the alphabet, she also sees them for music. She sometimes does paintings of particular songs she loves.

I agree the test is misleading. I got 73% and I know that can't be right. I don't normally associate anything with colours or images, but I'm good and instant at association if I'm actually asked 'what image/colour does this make you think of?'

Like you say the number 9 and ask what colour? I say mauve straight away, because 9 makes me think of night and a warm sort of coldness, and mystery. But when I'm dealing with numbers normally, it's just 9.

It's supposedly genetic

I'm reading the book "Outliers" and it has a fascinating tidbit about numbers - Asian languages such as Chinese have very consistent and concise words for numbers The digits one through nine are all single syllable. multidigit numbers are all consistent such as one-ten, one-ten-one, one-ten-two, one-ten-three whereas English has unique and unrelated words for those: ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen... it's apparently (though perhaps not solely) because of this language difference that Asians are better at math than those in Western countries.

Leila said:

Canotila, that's fascinating! Have you tried writing about it?



Yes

I have always had colours for numbers, letters, weekdays, months. (Grapheme-colour synaesthesia, if you want the official name.) And words in general. I used to think that everyone knew the colours, and that teachers deliberately had alphabet charts in the wrong ones just to be annoying. And I have a few words which have particular tastes as well. The name 'Stella' tastes like tunafish, and 'Dwayne' tastes like mothballs. My partner's last name has a very deep rich sweet taste.

There's a reasonable amount of evidence for synaesthesia being a genetic thing. My sister has it too, although hers is way better than mine. She not only sees colours for the alphabet, she also sees them for music. She sometimes does paintings of particular songs she loves.

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Not writing, but I have done a lot of paintings. One day when I get my own toddler proof studio set up, I hope to do a series of the periodic table with each individual element. They all make their own little spiral with the atomic number and everything coded in there. Gallium is my favorite, it looks like an orange julius being flushed down the toilet.

I think it's true that it is genetic. My nephew has it, I think. He's three years old. I have several pet corn snakes, and they are varying shades of brown, red, and orange. Once we were working on colors, which he is very good at anyway, and I asked him what color that snake was. He sniffed it and said "purple". I asked him if he was sure, and he said that yes, the snake smelled purple. Then I asked him what color the snakes scales were, and he said "oh, those are orange", which was correct. I had him smell my other snakes and he said they all smelled purple too.

That's so cool you can taste stuff! Mine is all visual.

I'm not really sure if I have synesthesia; I find that music will paint pictures in my mind. The beginning of Pink Floyd's "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond (Part 1)" will bring green, rolling fields on a cloudy day.
Not so much with the numbers-words-colors (but 3 is blue and 42 green for whatever reason).
I guess that might count.