Have you ever experienced synesthesia?

Weird. I was just discussing this with a friend.

Link

Yep. I’m a synesthete alright. I too have never been able to smell a color or see a sound, but I do have a few forms of it. I have grapheme synesthesia, but only for single digit numbers and a few letters of the alphabet: 0 is white, 1 is black, 2 is orange, 3 is blue, 4 is yellow, 5 is purple, etc. I see even numbers in general as being yellowy and odd numbers as being more red and blue. I also have another form of synesthesia called “number form” where I see a mental map of certain sequences of numbers like the numbers 1–100 or 1–1000 or the years 1900–2000. It usually makes a double-helix style 3-D “staircase” that I see in my mind when I think about these number sequences.

Now that I think about it, I’ve always seen Monday as being orange, Tuesday as blue, Wednesday as purple, Thursday as orange, and Friday as green. I don’t see Saturday and Sunday as having any color, though.

My friends love telling other people about it and I like freaking people out by telling them about it. :)

Nope, not even under the influences of hallucinogens.

Outside of a very intense acid trip in the 1970s, no. But I definitely did see sound them.

I have a form of synesthesia known as Ordinal-Linguistic Personification. I tend to visualize non-material things (concepts, the calendar, etc.). For example, I see the year as an upside “U”, but closed at the bottom. January is in the lower right side, February is above that, etc. May starts to turn to the left. June and July are at the top. August is found on the left side. Then there is a sharp turn to the right at the bottom. Then in order, left to right, are September, October, November, and December.
I also tend to visualize emotions. An example would be yellow and orange are different shades of happiness. A rusty orange is a more constant form of happiness while yellow is a cheery kind and is a bit fleeting. Melencholy is kind of a dark aquamarine. Depression is a very dark fuscia.

edit: fuchsia

I have had gems hum…...once.

@Mariah “Every letter of the alphabet, every one digit number and some two-digit numbers, and each day of the week have always had colors in my mind.”

Explain, please.

I get taste and smell crossed up frequently, but those are the two most commonly related.

For me, numbers have personalities, and meanings beyond their numerical value.

I had no idea synesthesia was so common!

I have it: letters, numbers, words have color. Proper nouns have very strong, distinct color—all of them, not just days of the week but months, place names, people’s names, titles, etc. Some sounds have shape and color.

It isn’t common at all.

It’s been discussed in a number of fluther threads before. I came as close as I could to explaining the experience here. Descriptions I’ve read by people who’ve studied the phenomenon but don’t have it themselves and may not even believe in it are invariably nonsense.

I’ve been told that I have a very rare kind and I had no idea what I thought was just a quirk of mine could be described as a form of synesthesia. Ever since I can remember, letters have had personalities and moods.

Would those who have posted here care to go into more detail? @DrasticDreamer – I have no idea what that means – could you try to describe what kind of personality it has – and are there literally 26 personalities – one for each letter? And moods for letter – I can’t even get my (usually imaginative) mind around that. You must explain!!!!

:-)

@zenele I don’t know why really, but ever since I can remember I have associated a color with each letter of the alphabet, day of the week, etc. Like, when I picture the letter/word/number in my mind it’s always a certain color. A is red, B is orange, C is yellow, D is green, E is green, F is pink… 0 is white, 1 is black, 2 is dark blue, 3 is green, 4 is purple, 5 is yellow… Monday is blue, Tuesday is green, Wednesday is yellow, Thursday is purple, Friday is yellow, Saturday is pink, and Sunday is yellow.

I have sound>colour synaethesia. Certain sounds, words and letters of the alphabet will bring certain colours to mind, but only if I hear the letter spoken aloud (or imagine it spoken aloud). Vowels are light/pale colours, consonants are darker and bolder, and the first and last letters of a word take precedence.

When I was a kid I had an alphabet book where the letters were coloured and I was annoyed with it because the colours were wrong.

@Mariah

I find it interesting that we both see A as red, 0 as white, and 1 as black. I wonder if that’s some kind of basic form people see. :)

I’ve heard that it’s common for synaesthetes to have similar colours for the same letters. A is pink for me, but I noticed that @Mariah shares yellow C, green D and white O/0 with me. My B is dark blue, E is very light orange, F is bright orange.

I still—honestly—do not understand. But I imagine this is the case for people who are not like that. How is a day a colour? How can the same colour be for different days? How can a colour be a number and a day?

Amazing.

:-)

@DominicX It does say in the wikipedia article that A is very commonly agreed upon as being red! I wonder why that is?

Haha, when I read what you other synaesthetes’ colors are and they disagree with mine, I can’t help thinking, “No, that’s WRONG!” Mine just… seem right. :(

@zenele Not every letter has a personality and mood for me, but for instance, the letter “K” is kind of decrepit and feeble. The letter “L” is stoic and solemn. I could go on, but I have no rhyme or reason. They just kind of are that way and have been, ever since I was little. I remember asking my mom and sister, when I was really little, if they saw the same personalities in letters as I did, and I will never forget the looks and questions that I got after that.

Cool.

@DrasticDreamer That is… awesome. :O

And for me, K is purple and L is dark green.

@zenele, it’s not that a day is a color (noun-noun). The name of a day has a certain color as an attribute (noun-adjective). The fact that a lemon is yellow does nothing to prevent a banana from being yellow. In my head the letter B is about the same color as the name June (medium blue). The letter R is about the same color as the name July (royal blue). That’s just the color they appear to have in my mind; no other connection, physical or symbolic, exists between them.

I don’t understand (in the sense of sharing the internal experience) what it is like to imagine a melody and hear the orchestration it wants, and be able to write it down, in such a way that a symphony is the result; but I can think of weak analogies that I do understand, and the existence of symphonies tells me it’s possible. I can’t externalize my experience of synaesthesia, only report on it, but it is just as mysterious and just as authentic.

Did you read my earlier description of what it is like to “know” those are the colors without physically seeing them with your visual apparatus?

Thanks, dear. I think I get it more, but do not understand it. Maybe if I tried to attribute a scent to a letter or number – but I fear this would be a forced and artificial experiment.

It’s probably more like what a song does to you – unique to each person?

I just remembered that my dad is also a synaesthete, but not like me. He associates colors with sounds. He says a dial tone is a dark blue and a car horn is orange.

@zenele, if you’re color-blind, it’s no wonder you don’t get it. You’d probably find it easier to understand someone who experiences flavors (tastes, not textures) as if they came in distinctive shapes: pointed, ragged, round, etc.—not metaphorically but actually as a tactile sensation. That’s not me, but I’ve read about it. From color-blindness to grapheme-color synaesthesia is probably just too great a leap.

I still don’t really “get” it – even with tastes – why does a taste have a shape?

But then I don’t get quantum physics either.

I am colour-blind but also a bit of an idiot-savante – without the savante part.

It doesn’t, to most of us, @zenele. That’s the point. That’s why this kind of experience or sensation is notable: it’s very rare, and most of us don’t have any idea what it’s really like, even by analogy.

Some people who don’t have any idea but do have degrees after their name declare it to be imaginary precisely because they can’t imagine it.

* sigh*

She so smart. Lovely, too.

I have GC synthestia as well, but it doesn’t really change much. I try to use it to the advantage of my music, but it doesn’t work unless I found some serious inspiration. I didn’t even know it was normal to see those colors until a friend told me he didn’t see them like me. My mom said I might be crazy, so that made me a scared little 6 year old :P

Oliver Sacks has written quite a bit on this, and there were a couple of Radio Lab podcasts that talked about it. Unfortunately, I can’t link to them at work, but I’ll see if I can find them.

I just discovered for the first time that I have another type of synesthesia too. Three or four nights ago my husband brought me two sacks of roast coffee beans that were labeled alike and asked me if they smelled the same. I closed my eyes and inhaled one, then the other, and then I went back and did it again for a long time. Suddenly I realized that the comparison I was making was visual and that what was taking me so long was that I was looking back and forth between two very similar color ladders to see if they were different. In the end I said they were.

Last night I drew the two ladders.

These are not exact, because I can’t reproduce the entire grid from memory, but it was very much like this.

This is the first time I have ever been able to really draw a synesthetic experience because when you draw letters and numbers in their colors, they look wrong. That’s because the color isn’t out there—it’s in here. But this was abstract: purely shape and color, with no other data content.

So here you have a glimpse of what synesthesia is like (for me). You shut your eyes, stick your nose in a sack of coffee beans, and see one of these.

@Jeruba wow that’s a very detailed pattern you saw there. I don’t think I would have been able to memorise a pattern like that long enough to even tell if it was the same or different, much less remember it long enough to draw it out. It reminds me of DNA charts. (Wouldn’t it be cool if you were able to actually smell the DNA pattern of organic substances?)

I did once make a colour chart to illustrate the colours I see with each letter of the alphabet but because my synaesthesia is phonic rather than graphic, I sometimes get different colours for the same lettter, depending on how it’s pronounced. For example the letter C, if pronounced like an S is yellow, but if pronounced like a K it’s purple.

@downtide, this isn’t an exact reproduction because I couldn’t retain all that. But those are the types of colors and proportions, and that was the arrangement: a three-column ladder for each aroma, and a repeating pattern (you can see it recurs several times going vertically), with most of the slots or windows the same in the two ladders but a few different—more black on the left, an extra gold and tan on the right, etc. This is why I had to look very hard: I was essentially oscillating my vision left and right and trying to hold enough of the pattern at one time to make the comparison. I only had to see enough differences to establish that they weren’t identical.

Later my husband asked my son the same question. My son did it the old-fashioned way (by scent) and said they were close but not the same.

I was really amazed to discover the meaning of what I was doing at this very late stage, when all my life I had thought it was only an effect with letters, numbers, and sounds (voices, ambient noises as from motor vehicles and tools, and music).

@Jeruba that’s really fascnating. Thankyou.