Interesting question! Here’s my “chart”
0 = white
1 = grey
2 = beige
3 = dark green
4 = light red
5 = black
6 = dark yellow
7 = navy blue (7 is incredibly vivid to me, see below)
8 = medium blue
9 = dark orange
10 = greyish white
11 = burnt umber
As numbers get higher, they often change colors (“52” is light orange); the exception is any number containing a 7 – anything to do with 7 is always navy blue. I also have emotions linked to some numbers: 11, for example, is a sad and boring afternoon on a hot summer day (and “Tuesday” evokes the same).
To me, letters and numbers have colors. So do musical notes and keys. I’ve known this as far back as I can remember.
Even numbers tend to be in the red-purple-blue spectrum, plus black-gray-white. Odd numbers tend to be in the orange-yellow-green part of the spectrum, plus brown.
It’s interesting to listen to music in which the key often changes.
It’s probably not proper synesthesia, but I have this thing with guitar chord shapes. I’ve mentioned it before. It’s not a super strong perception, but it’s constant, and it has been the same since I first picked up the guitar. It’s only chord shapes as I play them, not the chords as they sound. It stays the same when I play with a capo, and, heck, I can’t really tell chords apart by ear much anyway. I have like the opposite of perfect pitch. Anyway:
A = blue. B = orange. C = yellow. D = red. E = white. F = green. G = purple.
Am = light blue. Bm = peach. Cm = a rather ugly yellow (so I don’t like that chord much). Dm = a very bright red. Em = still white. Fm = dark green. Gm = a greyish sort of pink.
It works for other types of chords, too, but not all of them. And, yes, this does lead to whole songs having colors, sometimes, or color themes. “Back to the Old House” by the Smiths has a lovely yellow-chartreuse-green thing going on. “Things Behind the Sun” by Nick Drake is very blue, with some blue-green, and some red splotches. And so on.
I visualize numbers as black writing against a white background, like paper or a dry erase board. I can force myself to imagine them as colors, stylized shapes, or against vibrant backgrounds, but that takes effort. I’m mediocre at math and mental arithmetic.
Nope. No trace - as in “how the heck does THAT work?”
I also set attribute bytes on computer screens, but cannot imagine an unconscious linkage between “those are not even close to being rational” thought patterns.
It might be fun to play with - same as LSD and hallucinations.
Even so, I agree that your colleague sounds like someone who must indeed be the Uniquest of all.
(Off topic, I saw a girl wearing an obviously mass-produced shirt the other day; it said “Be UNIQUE!”)
Synethesia is NOT based on learning or conditioning, it is, when it occurs, invariable, consistent, and possibly to some degree hard-wired.
Certain pharmaceuticals like hallucinogens seem able to induce it in otherwise normal human beings. So can oxygen deprivation and other states. But few people without such influences experience it. I’ll point out that “1 in 20” would still qualify as “few”. No one really knows how common this is - to the people who experience it, it’s normal life and they are unlikely to seek “help” for it.
I have it, quite mildly and in the most common form (seeing colors and shapes* for sounds), and it seems so normal to me that it is hard to believe most people don’t experience the same thing. My colors are pretty boring, too - I see grey or black for certain phonemes, or yellow, or a kind of washed-out orange.
All of the other days of the week are yellow, orange, black, or grey, but Tuesday has no color since I don’t see any of the sounds in that word. I can remember as a little kid asking my mother repeatedly, “mommy, what color is Tuesday?” and being thoroughly exasperated when she had no idea what I was talking about, even when I explained, “You know, like Wednesday is orange, Thursday and Saturday are grey, and Friday is black?”
Actually I don’t see shapes as much as I see … dimensional positions in space? Very hard to describe, and it is a very weak sensation. But it has been there all my life.
I might have some loose associations with numbers and colors, but absolutely nothing that qualifies as synesthesia. I certainly do not literally see colors or smell different scents when I hear music or see/hear numbers or anything like that, which I understand synesthesia to be (i.e. a literal crossing of sensory paths.)
I recently read an article where they were describing reading as a kind of trained Synesthesia, even without associating letters with colors, say.
Think about it: you’re just seeing markings right now, yet they’re (probably) accompanied by hearing a voice in your mind.
And that symbols -> voices thing is absolutely a hard-wired thing in your brain now; it’s not purely conscious, that would be far too slow.
Two is blue, three is green, and four is orange. Apparently my ideasthesia likes vowel harmony. Though one is yellow, for no particular reason.
A handful of times in my life, a scene from a movie or television show has evoked a distinct olfactory sensation that is the same every time I see it. The scene where Willow is cutting off the dragon’s heads is one of them.
Everyone’s is unique, but there are some significant patterns for certain letters. Many people see A as red and C as yellow, for instance- which bugs me, because my A and C are exactly the other way around.
For me, it’s just normal. Like if someone asks, “Isn’t it distracting that food has both taste and texture for you?”
Concept synesthesia was lumped in with sensory synesthesia in the aforementioned Wednesday is Indigo Blue.
As for non-localized synesthesia not being “real” synesthesia- I have never seen anyone say that before. Especially since it’s the most common type. To quote Wikipedia, “Cytowic’s early cases mainly included individuals whose synesthesia was frankly projected outside the body (e.g. on a “screen” in front of one’s face). Later research showed that such stark externalization occurs in a minority of synesthetes. Refining this concept, Cytowic and Eagleman differentiated between “localizers” and “non-localizers” to distinguish those synesthetes whose perceptions have a definite sense of spatial quality from those whose perceptions do not.[3]”
It is not so hard to understand. We tend to think of ourselves as normal and that most everyone’s experience is comparable to our own. Hell, until I saw an article on aphantasia I thought that “picture it in your head” was just an expression and that people did not actually picture things in their heads because I don’t. I never have and I thought that was normal. Turns out that I’m the abnormal one. Who knew?
Edit to add, I have no trace of synesthesia although my 11 year old claims to have strong associations of colour to her numbers (6 is purple).