Personal experiences with synesthesia?

Mmm, when I was a little kid, colors had gender. I remember separating my crayons into a “boy” group and a “girl” group. Red was always “male,” and blue was always “female,” for instance. This sounds like it would really be stretching to call this synesthesia, though. I figured it was some weird facet of my psychology (blue = cold = female? red = hot = male? Who knows.)

Colors still seem either male or female to me, but it’s not something I think about.

I have grapheme-color synesthesia–I was so happy to find out in my teens that what I did had a name (I just thought everybody could do it!) I used to make up code names for things based on the color of their real names. Nowadays being able to see color for letters and numbers isn’t terribly useful, but it’s fun and I enjoy it. People invariably ask me what color their names are when I tell them I’m a synesthete, which makes a good conversation starter. The only place I really find it useful is that I’m convinced that it’s responsible for the fact that I’m a near-perfect speller–once I learn a word, I rarely forget how to spell it because part of learning the spelling is learning the word’s color.

My spousal unit sees sounds–he gets colors and patterns in his head when he hears people talk or hears music. I refer to it as “making his own music videos,” and I wish I had that kind because it sounds more fun than mine. I wish he was artistic, because I’ve often thought that a painting (or better yet, an animation) showing what he sees when he hears songs would be very cool.

You have it totally backwards - red is clearly a girl, along with yellow, white and orange, and blue is a boy, just like green, black and purple. :wink:

I was reading, and apparently there were some good arguments between composers about what color the scales were…

Out of curiosity, are there any dopers out there whose young children have exhibited synesthesia? Only time will tell if my son has it (i.e., if he stops making the associations he has been), but he’s been telling me for a while that the living room windows make a mad face and that they’re girls. He consistently personifies other inanimate, non-animal/human-looking objects, too, like his shoes, which are boys. It might just be his imagination, though. He’s only 3, and from the research I’ve done, it sounds like it could be something that maybe he just hasn’t yet grown out of. I had very similar experiences when I was younger.

I asked him how that made him feel and he said it made him happy. I just told him it was ok to see those things (and mentioned that I used when I was younger, too), but that he needed to tell me immediately if they made him nervous.

Malleus, Incus, Stapes! has helped me understand my very mild form -

I see and have always seen a year as an egg shape. June, July, August are the oval bottom with December the pointy top. I only learned a year ago that everyone doesn’t have shapes for time.

From the Wikipedia article: “In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be “farther away” than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise).”

I have this too, but my year is shaped more like a teardrop lying on its side pointing left. The late summer/early fall months are in this corner, with the spring and summer months taking up the curved part of the tear. Interestingly, the months are not distributed evenly, and the summer months take up more space along the line than other seasons. That is, if one were walking along my calendar, you’d have to run through the summer and walk through the other seasons to maintain a constant amount of time spent in each month’s segment. Perhaps this is an artifact of childhood summers going by too quickly.

A great (fictional) story on this topic is The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffery Ford

Like a few others in the thread, I have a pretty mild synesthesia which primarily manifests in numbers, letters, colors, months, states, etc., having gender. It’s not really a matter of “seeing” it for me, it’s just the way things are.

What? That’s all wrong! Eight a dude? Pshaw!

Damn straight!

Hold on? White is female and purple is male? You’re nuts!!!

But seriously, as the OP can see from this exchange, tongue and cheek as it is, synasthetes, at least of our type, don’t process these associations in any artificial way. I know intellectually that Sateryn and I are both wrong about purple having any gender, but for the life of me I just can’t process his (her?) statement as anything other than an obvious falsehood, just like if he had written “Purple and green are the same color.” Obviously, they’re not. Just as obviously, purple is female. It’s as plain as day, and it even sort of surprises me that you don’t “realize” it. Indeed, when I was a kid, I remember having conversations with my parents about it, where I thought it was so strange that when people were making up numbers, they didn’t space them out boy-girl-boy-girl, but stuck 7 (clearly male) in the middle of a run of girls (5, 6, 8, and 9 all being distaff digits). Because at the time, I assumed that everybody else saw the same genders I did.

The OP might want to run a search on synesthesia. Similar threads pop up every several months, I guess because whenever one of you non-synesthetes hears about it, it seems such a bizarre way of processing information.

–Cliffy

Another one is A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass (it’s a YA novel, but she’s got synesthesia down pretty well. I wrote her a note after I read it and she responded, telling me that she’d spent quite awhile talking to synesthetes and researching the condition before writing the book.)

When I first saw a link to this story, I didn’t realize it was fiction. Started out normally enough for a synesthete, with colors and tastes for sounds. When he started seeing the girl with the coffee, I was taken aback but figured it was a syn-induced hallucination. Then it turned out the girl was real, and I was like, “Waaait just a minute here…”

I think of numbers as specific color but don’t literally see them in color when looking at them written, so I guess it’s a pretty mild case.

I’ve tripped on acid several times and not had the famous synesthesia experiences from it. Nor do I see the “trails” everyone goes on & on about. I get one and only one visual “hallucination”: at a certain focal range, usually a couple yards or so, the surfaces of things often seem to be moving. Writhing, almost, as if covered in a layer of gypsy moth caterpillars.

I have synaesthetic imagination, as others in this thread report: not so much a vivid sensory experience in one sense of something encountered normatively in another sense, but rather THINKING about this or that ==> some visual or multimedia or (less often) auditory representation of that thought.

Complex concepts get turned into nouns that get shapes and may exhibit force lines illustrating their relationship to other complex concepts. Sometimes they play out like movies with trajectories, plots even.