I was prompted by Zoe’s post in this thread to look up synesthesia. I’d never heard of the condition before, but I definitely have it.
According to this website I have both facetographemia (assigning personalities to phenomes) and sexographemia (assigning sex/gender to phenomes.)
I’ve always experienced letters and numbers this way, and assumed that others did as well. I remember explaining it to my husband a year or so ago and having him look at me funny. I’d never mentioned it before, because it just seemed to be normal.
(4 and R are the same for me, 5 and F are the same, 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7 are boys, 2, 6, 8, 9 are girls, 0 is neuter, and each has a specific personality for me. I won’t go into letters!)
There seems to be quite a bit of information on the web about color associative synesthesia, but I haven’t found much regarding personality/gender associations.
Yup, I do. I assign gender to numbers and letters as well. I also carry a mental image of the timeline of history as a sequence of connected line segments, with right-angle turns (in differing directions) at significant dates:
Birth of Christ
1000
1900
1970 (I was born in 1967, so this is the first decade I remember)
1980 (The angles for 1980 and 1990 are obtuse rather than right)
1990
2000
I also have a semiphotographic memory, and so I visualize calendar dates the same as they appear on a monthly calendar page.
I haven’t followed your link yet, but I do know that the first time I saw the Grateful Dead in concert also happened to be the first time I took LSD: I saw black sheets of lightning bolts pouring from Jerry Garcia’s guitar. Lots of other stuff since.
My mom always said that she would hear a person’s name and always have a color or pattern associated with that name.
If I indeed have synesthesia, it’s not identified on Morgainelf’s list. I perceive shape/texture/area from smells. For example, I have one perfume that I associate with a flat board with a ball on top, another that smells like horizontal wavy lines, and another that’s like a small pyramid with one of the edges facing toward me.
You know, from this and what I posted in the “Why do we talk to ourselves?” GQ question, I feel like I’m outing myself as a crazy person.
On preview: cuauhtemoc, that reminds me of a short story by W.S. Merwin, in which he devotes a paragraph to each of the first 10 numbers and their personalities. 2 is a little girl in a yellow dress, IIRC.
Oh, I have the letters all figured out too. All of the genders and some of the personality traits are so obvious to me that I just take them for granted. My sister and I disagree on some of them, and we’ve had heated arguments about it. Apparently, ‘C’ is a boy in her twisted world, as is ‘9’. Insanity.
And they were all firmly established by the time I learned to read. I expect it goes back even further than that. You know what probably encourages this trend? Shows like Sesame Street, where they anthropomorphize letters and numbers all the time. Maybe it makes them easier for kids to relate to?
I like reading things about synesthesia, but it all seems very vague to me, as if it means so many things, it doesn’t really mean anything.
I’ve yet to come across a decription of my own personal synesthesia thing, which is that certain multiplication problems have tastes. I loved math class when we were learning the times tables, it was like dessert. 8 x 6, for example, is lemon, like a lemon creme filling. It doesn’t work if it’s 6 x 8 though. And the number 48 doesn’t have a taste, it has to be expressed as 8 x 6.
These are the ones that are the strongest:
8 x 6 = lemon
4 x 3 = chocolate
7 x 6 = vanilla
3 x 9 = mint
I still get really happy if I have to buy 7 of something, and then discover in the store that they cost 6 dollars each. Ooooh, vanilla!
The closest I come to any of this is that I maintain that some movies are left-handed and some are right-handed and if you sit on the wrong side of the theater, you risk having the film (literally) strike you the wrong way.
I have mental colours for numbers and days of the week. They’re not fixed in stone, and they seem to have worn off as I got older. I also once saw some music when under the influence of psyloscibin (AC/DC, and it was a big purple worm-like thing).
I know that you were probably in a hurry and made a typo but “3” is obviously female and not “male”. I am sure that we all knew what you meant but I thought that you would get a big chuckle out of your mistake if I pointed it out.
I have always encoded sounds visually. For me, high-frequency sounds are usually bright colors, and low-frequency sounds are usually darker colors. I also create specific mental images for particular sounds.
According to my parents, as a young child, I identified “white noise” as sounding very white before I even knew what it was called. I thought it should be obvious to anyone that the sound was white.
I don’t think in sounds. I don’t hear a voice in my head. Instead, I see words as I think them. I see whole sentences at a time – punctuation and all. When I’m communicating verbally with another person, I also visualize – automatically – every word that is said and pay little attention to the person’s voice. For this reason, I’ve always been a superior speller, but pronunciation doesn’t come so naturally to me. I can read very quickly because, instead of “sounding out” every word, I process the meaning of whole groups of words at a time.
Often, my dreams lack much sound as well. Usually, the people in my dreams have “thought bubbles” – exactly what you’d see in comic strips – and so I read what they’re saying rather than hear it. Bizarre?
Why do I invariably convert auditory stimuli to visual stimuli? I don’t have impaired hearing. Rather, it seems that my sense of hearing is unbearably acute – sensitive to an extent that sounds really bother me. The sound of a vacuum cleaner, for instance, is just about as painful to me as a broken toe. Fire alarms are like death. I suppose I just try to block out these painful auditory stimuli whenever possible by creating corresponding images instead.
And I know you’re just having a laugh on me, for I know that you would never deign to propagate this vile heresy. It’s okay, I can take a joke. LOL Good one, Shagnasty!
I love reading threads about these things, because its just so weird!! I can’t imagine seeing numbers or letters as colours, or as tastes,. etc. I think the world must be a very stimulating place for you guys…kind of makes me feel like I’m living in black & white while you’ve all moved on to Technicolor!
