There are certain tendencies, but nothing 100%. Heck, I don’t think there’s anything that pushes 50%.
When synesthetes gather together, the dialogue tends to devolve into mock arguments along the lines of “What, red twos? You’re crazy, two is obviously green.” We just can’t seem to help ourselves.
Since I was a really little kid (almost pre-literate), one was white, two was yellow, three was blue, four was red, five was green, six was orange, seven was grey, eight was black and nine was brown.
One is white. Two is green. Three is yellow. Four is reddish-purple. Five is dark blue. Six is brown. Seven is purple. Eight is kind of a purple-pink. Nine is black. 0 is somewhere between white and clear.
My letter and number colors have been completely consistent since I was a little kid. I’m convinced my synesthesia helps me spell really well, though it never did much for my math abilities.
I don’t need to drop acid for that. Musical notes and keys are different colors, and they’re different than the colors of letters, just as dates are different than the colors of individual numbers.
What’s interesting is that there’s so much disagreement about the colors of numbers and letters. It would be really amazing if different people saw the SAME colors.
Don’t even get me started on how the damn things taste. Tuesday moring, for example, has this disgusting clove/anise thing going. By the afternoon it’s like chewing on bitter lemongrass.
I might have a slight case of number form synesthesia. Numbers, and especially dates, fall into certain images. The date thing is useful; it allows me to see how a particular year fits in with others.
Certain words also have a feeling on my tongue. Not quite taste, but close.
When I think of an historical year, I see columns of centuries arranged in my mental eye with the location of the year in question highlighted, and I can zoom in and out, as it were. This doesn’t give a real sense of what I ‘see’, nor would any physical diagram, because it’s far more complicated than that.
Some centuries have specific colours, which may vary in shade in different regions and if associated with different ideas. Events and ranges of dates appear when they are relevant, as do all kinds of images, maps, and vaguer associations. Everything can change dynamically, rotate, expand and contract as necessary. BC dates and centuries run backwards and downwards to the left instead of upwards and to the right like AD dates and centuries.
Days, weeks, months, and individual years are also spatial in my mind, but in a flexible way that it would be difficult to capture in diagrams. Even when I do arithmetic I ‘see’ the relationship of numbers visually. When I did mathematics and physics at university, I found that that I was sometimes slower to grasp a new mathematical concept than other students, because I first had to ‘see’ it in a mental image before I could understand it. But then I would understand it more thoroughly than they did.
I’m not sure whether this counts as synesthesia, but when reading I also hear the voices of the characters, and see the whole scene in my mind’s eye. Sometimes when I am really engrossed in a book, I am completely unaware of the pages and printed words, and instead only see and hear the scene unfolding in my mind, as in video, but three-dimensionally.
Y’all crazy. 0 is black; 1 is brown; 2 is red; 3 is orange; 4 is yellow; 5 is green; 6 is blue; 7 is puprple; 8 is grey; and 9 is white.
Oh, wait…that’s just the resistor color code, ain’t it?
I don’t think I have any synesthetic tendencies. I mean, sure, I may have loose cross-sensual associations, but they’re not consistent, and, from what I understand, true synesthetes really do experience the sense that is being crossed (e.g. one physically sees the color blue when hearing, say, an E flat) not just has a loose mental association with the color.
Synesthesia can cover mental associations as well; in fact, it’s much more common that way. If you know that A is yellow, because duh of course A = yellow, what else would it be, you don’t have to physically see yellow on the page.