Synesthesia

In My Humble Opinion
21

Don’t be silly. S is blue. Everybody knows that! :smiley:

Another color-grapheme synesthete checking in. I’ve had this all my life, but didn’t know it had a name until I got out of college and saw an article about it in the newspaper (which I was working for at the time, so I read all the little articles buried in the back pages). I love synesthesia and wouldn’t give it up–for one thing, it makes me a fantastic speller. Once I learn a word, I don’t misspell it because forever after it will “look” wrong. (Typos are another matter, of course!) It’s also made me a decent editor for the same reason. Misspelled words just jump out at me.

I’m married to another synesthete–he sees colors and patterns for sounds, and talks about the color of people’s voices or the video he sees in his head when he hears music. I’m kind of jealous–that seems like much more fun than seeing letters in color. But at least we understand each other when I tell him his name is green and he tells me he doesn’t like a particular song because it’s muddy gray with jarring purple spikes.

22

Well, thank you for that, if only for the affirmation. What you mention is exactly the problem with Eldest – He often looks like a person with ASD, so he starts with that diagnosis. Then after a while it appears that, well, he is hugely empathetic, quite social with and well liked by children (though he has trouble with adults very often), gets most of his language comprehension from nonverbal signals, and has an ordinary if very intense imaginary life. So then the diagnosis is reviewed and changed again. And again. I am hoping we can just stick with APD for a while as it seems that approaching it from that angle gets the best results so far.

He describes his experience as “a stutter in my head, sometimes coming in and sometimes going out”. (One of his friends has a stutter). He also switches word order but this has always been chalked up to his bilingualism – the word order in Dutch is not the same as in English and results very often in the kinds of reversals you mention.

The school he now attends is a speech/language school, which was originally a school for the deaf and a lot of the approaches they use were indeed designed for teaching deaf or partially deaf children. He has a thingie they put in his ear and the teacher has a microphone around her neck, so the sound comes in right in his ear (but not loud) , which seems to help him to focus on/get meaning from the spoken word. Not unlike having someone speak softly in your ear.

I don’t suppose you invented a language as a young child? If so I shall be forced to name you his much older twin, lol.

23

Marienee, you’re welcome. It’s actually a bit of a relief to hear someone else’s experiences have been so close to mine, since I never had any contact with other children with communication disorders when I was growing up. The “stutter in his head” description your son gives does sound similar to what I experience. Screening out background noises (which I suspect is part of the reasoning behind the microphone set up?) helps quite a bit.

And, yes, I did make up a language as a kid! I’ve actually been working on one for a book I’m writing, too, so it’s an ongoing fascination.

Sounds like you’ve got an awesome kid, there. Best of luck to managing this.

24

I have very minor synasthesia. For me, numbers, letters and colors have gender. For instance, red, yellow, orange and purple are female; green, blue, brown, white, and black are male. A, C, E, F and G are male; B, D, and H are female, etc.

As I think about it, states and countries have gender, too, although it’s a much, much weaker association, and the vast majority of them are male.

–Cliffy

25

I also see certain numbers and letters as having a gender and color, and age.

Question for everyone: have your assigned colors, smells and genders changed over the years, or is S, for example still the same color it’s always been?

26

Try this trick that my kids showed me-

Make a fist, then straighten and stick out your index finger and thumb. Your left hand will be making the shape of an “L” for left- your right hand will not.

Does that help?

27

It’s the same as ever, except some of the associations are weaker than they were when I was a kid.

Here is a webcomic about synesthesia.

–Cliffy

28

Huh. Maybe Douglas Adams was right.

29

For me they’re the same as they’ve always been, and the associations haven’t gotten any weaker as I’ve gotten older.

30

I’m not sure whether my colors have stayed the same or not. When I first realized I was a synnie, I wasn’t so sure of my colors, and I thought S might be scarlet red. Now I’m pretty sure it’s pink, and it’s stayed pink the whole long while.

31

Okay, I have a question on all of this. My understanding was that actual synesthesia (the neurological condition) results in an experience where, for example, a person literally sees every number 4 as though it were written in green ink. What’s expressed above, to me, doesn’t seem to meet this criteria; it’s certainly a way of thinking metaphorically, and it a great mnemonic device, but I’m not getting how this is any different than standard, normally-wired creative thinking.

I mean, when I smell the air after a spring rainstorm, I think to myself about how green it smells. When in the same room with shrieking children, the sensation that their sound makes me feel is pain like shattered glass. I don’t have better words to describe what that particular sound feels like to me, but even though I associate it with shattered glass, I think it’s still a metaphor, not a literal experiencing of sound/pain as shattering glass. For that matter, I think of the year/seasons as the Wheel of the Year, shaped like a wagon wheel (or sometimes a compass or sundial), divided into quarters by solstices and equinoxes and those quarters further divided by the mid-season agricultural holidays; but I know damn well that this a metaphor I picked up from my spiritual mythology/training. It’s also a handy mnemonic device, as I tend to be rather visually oriented.

Can someone draw a clearer distinction for me? Where does a creatively-thinking brain end and a neurological condition begin, in terms of how people experience this? Am I a synesthete and just never realized it?

32

Okay, so there’s two types of syn-

There’s projective synesthesia, where you literally do see colors or hear sounds or whatever in the real world. In other words, what you’ve considered synesthesia.

Then there’s associative synesthesia, where you don’t actually see the colors, but you have a feeling about it. You know that 4 is blue, or that that song is tiger-striped.

The key here is random and consistant. If you think wet air smells green because you associate green with plants, that’s not syn. If today you think 4 is blue, and tomorrow you think it’s pink, that’s not syn. If you think 4 is blue, and 4 has always been blue for you (or changes very slowly over time; that point hasn’t been resolved), and there’s no intrinsic reason for 4 to be blue, that’s synesthesia.

Now having a shape to your year, that’s syn. So you’re still a synethete, even thought the smell-of-rain thing isn’t.

33

Like Malleus, Incus, Stapes! said, for many types of synesthetes our experiences are literal. I don’t imagine the color white when I hear a refrigerator motor kick on, or imagine the color purple when a truck using jake brakes passes by on the highway. I literally see flashes of color. It’s not something I have any control over, though I wish I did because I find it irritating much of the time.

34

The type I have is called “Ordinal Linguistic Personification”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_linguistic_personification

35

Well, that’s funny, because I threw that out as about the least synesthetic example I got. It’s taken directly from mythology I’ve read/learned/was taught over the years. It’s a solid association, yes, but it didn’t originate with me. “The Wheel of the Year” is a tarot card, for pete’s sake. We speak of seasons and agriculture in terms of cycles, which is related to circles, particularly “turning” circles, hence the wheel. Seeing cyclical time as something more-or-less circular-shaped is a common feature of Western culture. Clocks are round, sundials are round. Even Stonehenge was built in a circle. Compasses are round, too, and are divided into the eight main compass points, which correspond to the eight major astrological and agricultural holidays.

For that matter, when thinking in terms of a series of events, rather than repeating cyclical time, I imagine it as a line – i.e. linear time. An event/milestone from three years ago is farther to the left than one from two months ago.

A song or a particular style of music might make me feel warm, or cold. Some songs have given me a brief shiver.

Green is associated with the smell of chlorophyll, which is where the after-rain smell comes from. I’ve known it to smell more golden-yellow-green after the rain if the weather is warmer.

All of which I think demonstrates that I have a highly creative mind which automatically uses metaphor, associative memory, and imagined visual/sensory information as a way of processing, understanding, and remembering information. So while I get how literally seeing colors that aren’t there is synesthesia, I don’t get how imagining/“knowing” them to be there is. Why in particular make the leap from a “creative mind” to “synesthesia”? My mental image of linear time is just as automatic – I’ve thought of it that way ever since I can remember, and most of the time I’m not even consciously aware that I’m mentally making hash marks on a timeline, unless I stop to think about it, simply because I’m paying attention to the conversation I’m having. But it’s still a creative adaptation, not a “my neurons got crossed” kind of thing, unless I totally miss my guess. I probably made that association as a child, as something that made linear time-related things easier to remember, and it became ingrained. Short of something like a functional MRI I don’t see why there’d be an assumption of synesthesia on anything like that. If I made up stories to amuse myself as a child about the letter A and her boyfriend B, I’d think that would get ingrained and become an automatic pattern of thinking pretty quickly too.

I certainly don’t think it’s bad to be highly imaginative (given that I am), but I also don’t think it’s the same thing as a neurological condition. I assume that most of you did not get a functional MRI done, so where are you drawing the line, and why?

I suppose the sound to pain to glass thing might be, but I only get pain / discomfort / nausea associations with a few types of sounds that are particularly annoying. It corresponds more to particular frequencies/pitches than volume, although loud volume at a bad pitch is worse than soft volume at a bad pitch.

36

Can I ask if I’m one? Because I’m not sure if what I do counts or not.

Basically, numbers, letters and mathematical symbols all have a characteristic color in my mind. Lower-case 'j’s are light brown, upper case Js are more orange-ish, T’s are green, Xs are grey, addition is purple-y, π is pinkish, etc. Lots of other ideas/concepts have colors, too, but it is harder to notice when they don’t have a definite shape like symbols.

Since when I’m reading, the letters are all black or whatever the font color is, I never thought I was a synesthete, but whenever I think of the symbols or ideas they represent, the color is right there in my mind. But it is not like I taste colors or smell music or anything, though.

Anyway, do I count?

EDIT: Should have read more than half the thread before posting. Doh! (Music is mighty colorful to me too. But it’s all in my head, not real life. I’m beginning to think I’m just an imaginative person and not some special synesthete.)

37

Full-blown synesthete-freak here, who also uses “it” to compose music to this day. And to write. Rawr.

I cross just about every one of the senses, from a synesthetic standpoint and have participated in a number of studies (including one involving fMRI, which was insanely cool to do.) I also have temporal lobe epilepsy, exacerbated by a brain injury 10+ years ago (turning what once were only simple partial seizures into complex partial seizures). There’s possibly a link between TLE and the synesthesia.

I’m a grapheme/sound (music, etc.)/lexical/number → color/taste/smell/texture synesthete. Freaked the shit out of my parents as a kid, argued that the colored alphabets in my childhood books were all wrong (God damn it, As are red… interestingly, they are for many of us…), tended to make comments about certain foods tasting of certain colors, added numbers up to colors (1+1 = green) and, for the record, I still think E major tastes like earwax. :wink:

My dear and beloved husband likes to torture me by saying the words “nurse” and “plunge” over and over again knowing that, to me, they taste like goose-poop yellow (and dishsoap) and feel like nails on a chalkboard… (gaaaaaah!)

As for music – everything has a hue, every key has a color, every note has a color. It’s not actually something you “see when you close your eyes”, nor does it change at ALL. Specific notes, specific keys or tones ALWAYS have the same color (or hue). Household appliances buzz at the same damned frequency (which happens to be the same shade of purple). When my piano goes slightly flat, it drives me 'round the bend – C minor, my favorite key, goes sour and I can’t stand it. You can’t turn the colors/tastes/textures off. In some synesthetic kids, it’s enough to drive them totally 'round the bend (and makes them into fussy eaters, or hyperactive, or totally over-stimulated)… Heck, I was one weiiiiiird little girl m’self and far from being a bowl of petunias. I’m still a bit of a weirdo :wink: but whatcha gonna do… (other than become a composer, drama/musical theater teacher and screenwriter, right? Right…)

38

Just as an aside, Wendy Mass wrote a young-adult book about synesthesia, called A Mango-Shaped Space. It’s pretty good, and is a nice introduction to the phenomenon. I saw it in a bookstore and since it was about cats and synesthesia, two subjects I’m very interested in, I had to pick it up. When I finished I sent the author an email telling her how much I enjoyed seeing a synesthetic character for kids, and she actually wrote back to me. She’s not a synesthete herself, but she interviewed quite a few of them while researching the book.

39

Yeah, on the synesthete message board, about half the poeple say they came there because “i read this book called A MAngo Shaped Space, lol, and i thought it was so cool/didnt know it had a name. lol”.