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Discovering you have (what this article calls) classic synaesthesia is a very interesting experience. Suddenly many many things fall into place, but you also re

Discovering you have (what this article calls) classic synaesthesia is a very interesting experience. Suddenly many many things fall into place, but you also realize you experience the world in a fundamentally different manner than anyone else.

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keeganjw 9y ago
I remember I was 18, at college, and was eating in the dining hall with my friends one evening. We somehow started talking about our favorite colors and I said my favorite color was yellow probably because my name looks so yellow. They stopped eating and stared at me like I was crazy. They asked how does your name look yellow? I was like, what do you mean, it just is yellow. Do words not have colors for you? And just saying that out loud I realized how bizarre that sounded and that I didn't have an explanation for it. I honestly had never thought that much about the fact that words had colors for me. They proceeded to ask me what colors a ton of words were and then tested me again a few days later to see if I said the same things because they didn't believe me. And that's how I found out I had synaesthesia.
- dwringer 9y ago
  There is a game in which players are shown a series of words that name colors, i.e. "yellow", "red", "green", etc. Sometimes the words are the same color as what they state - "yellow" being drawn in yellow, for instance. Other times, the words are written in a different color, for instance "blue" being written in green. Then, participants are asked quickly to state either the color of a given word, or to read the word, in a sequence of words according to different patterns. Studies on this seem to indicate that everyone has at least some capacity to confuse words with the sensations they evoke, and if anyone has not done one of these exercises it can be very interesting. EDIT: Also, the descriptions people report of their imagination when reading a narrative description or exposition of a scene often include details seemingly arising in a loose associative way from the words themselves, without being explicitly described in the text. EDIT 2: And I'm not entirely comfortable with the notion that people experience the world in a "fundamentally different way" when there is evidence that this may not be a fundamental difference after all. Different it is, no doubt, but this seems to be a difference of magnitude rather than fundamental nature. The predominant character of the experiences may be subjectively different, leading to a different approach to many situations in a person's life, but the mechanisms appear to be fundamental to consciousness itself.
  - gerbilly 9y ago
    This is the so called Stroop effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect
- purvis 9y ago
  Does this affect how you perceive designs with colored text in them?
  - tbirrell 9y ago
    Yes, a little bit. If you gave me a word in a certain color font, that would take precedence. Its not like I was see "my" color. But if I thought of the word out of that context, it would be its normal color again (usually based on the color of the first letter like described in the article). Exceptions are things like logos which have a fairly strong association with certain colors.
  - keeganjw 9y ago
    It doesn't seem to. Text can be in any color and my synaesthesia stays the same. If the text itself was multicolored, maybe? I'm not sure. It doesn't come up that often.
    - adg002 9y ago
      How do you perceive the Google's logo?
      - zeta0134 9y ago
        I'm not the op, but I have the same grapheme–colour synaesthesia, and I perceive Google's logo in its original colors. But if I look at the word Google in plain text (or imagine it in my mind's eye) the coloration is different. [G] is kind of a brown, the [o]s are black, the [l] is white, and only the [e] at the end has any color, a bright green. I have to think about the individual letter associations; the brown and black dominate my perception of the word itself, but the vowels are a bit brighter. It's... kind of hard to describe, I'll admit. I guess I should stress that I don't "see" these colors. I just know, intuitively, that they are there. They are the color of the letters in my mind's eye, if you will. I suspect thus that it has nothing to do with the shape of the letters, but is a side effect of how my brain processes the language, and understands the underlying phonemes. That would also explain why the vowels seem to be so much brighter, since they are the most important letters when I'm scanning text quickly for comprehension.
- liberte82 9y ago
  Do you actually physically see yellow with your eyes or is it more in your mind, or a feeling of yellowness? Also do different people with synaesthaesia see the same colors for the same words?
  - wickawic 9y ago
    I can answer the second question, which is 'no'.
  - evincarofautumn 9y ago
    With my grapheme→colour and word→colour synaesthesia, it’s definitely in my mind—when I look at the letter A, for example, my brain has the same reaction as if I were looking at a yellow object, even though I can see that it’s not actually yellow. An upside of synaesthesia is that I have very good clerical accuracy, which is helpful for programming—typographical errors “stick out” because things appear the wrong colour. A downside is that I can’t really use syntax highlighting, because I find it distracting. This is what my terminal Emacs looks like: https://imgur.com/m76W8eF https://imgur.com/m76W8eF (with soft wrapping because there’s not really a line length limit in this codebase).
- FractalNerve 9y ago
  hmm, I'm not sure but I think there are many people with hidden synaesthesia like you, especially other forms that we don't know yet. Or there are different types of synaesthesia-like neurological phenomenons. Unsure if the government/doctors or schools should help you use/detect these or not. I didn't think about this, but does feeling a smell or scent in different emotional strengths also count to synaesthesia?
- explainplease 9y ago
  For synaesthesia-challenged Emacs users: https://i.imgur.com/ZQkgI3U.png https://i.imgur.com/ZQkgI3U.png
  - hackpert 9y ago
    That looks so incredibly wrong.
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amyjess 9y ago
I remember the huge lightbulb that went off in my head when I discovered that number forms are a form of synesthesia. I've had number forms all my life. I never knew where they came from or why, so the way I see numbers finally made sense when I found out that it was part of a condition I've actually heard of before. I also have some weak chromagraphemia, but the number forms are much stronger. For example, here's a rough approximation of how I see the numbers 0-100. It's not perfect because it's hard to do suble slopes in text. 69 70 71 66 67 68 72 73 74 63 64 65 75 76 77 60 61 62 78 79 80 29 30 31 59 81 28 32 58 82 27 33 57 83 26 34 56 84 25 35 55 85 24 36 54 86 23 37 53 87 22 38 52 88 21 39 51 89 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 This also applies to years, by the way. Just add 1900 to all these numbers and you have my visualization of the 20th century. I find it amusing that the Great Depression is a downward slope... but so is the boom of the '80s.
pawelk 9y ago
I think I have now remembered the moment I became aware of my synesthesia. As a kid I was a bit of an art geek, I liked to read on art history and theory. Reading about Kandinsky there was an introduction that he had some kind of unique way of mapping sounds to colors, followed by a quote from Kandinsky. I was like "This is strange indeed, he got like half of the colors wrong!". Then the book proceeded to explain synesthesia and everything became clear.

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keeganjw 9y ago

I remember I was 18, at college, and was eating in the dining hall with my friends one evening. We somehow started talking about our favorite colors and I said my favorite color was yellow probably because my name looks so yellow. They stopped eating and stared at me like I was crazy. They asked how does your name look yellow? I was like, what do you mean, it just is yellow. Do words not have colors for you? And just saying that out loud I realized how bizarre that sounded and that I didn't have an explanation for it. I honestly had never thought that much about the fact that words had colors for me. They proceeded to ask me what colors a ton of words were and then tested me again a few days later to see if I said the same things because they didn't believe me. And that's how I found out I had synaesthesia.

dwringer 9y ago
There is a game in which players are shown a series of words that name colors, i.e. "yellow", "red", "green", etc. Sometimes the words are the same color as what they state - "yellow" being drawn in yellow, for instance. Other times, the words are written in a different color, for instance "blue" being written in green. Then, participants are asked quickly to state either the color of a given word, or to read the word, in a sequence of words according to different patterns. Studies on this seem to indicate that everyone has at least some capacity to confuse words with the sensations they evoke, and if anyone has not done one of these exercises it can be very interesting. EDIT: Also, the descriptions people report of their imagination when reading a narrative description or exposition of a scene often include details seemingly arising in a loose associative way from the words themselves, without being explicitly described in the text. EDIT 2: And I'm not entirely comfortable with the notion that people experience the world in a "fundamentally different way" when there is evidence that this may not be a fundamental difference after all. Different it is, no doubt, but this seems to be a difference of magnitude rather than fundamental nature. The predominant character of the experiences may be subjectively different, leading to a different approach to many situations in a person's life, but the mechanisms appear to be fundamental to consciousness itself.
- gerbilly 9y ago
  This is the so called Stroop effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect
purvis 9y ago
Does this affect how you perceive designs with colored text in them?
- tbirrell 9y ago
  Yes, a little bit. If you gave me a word in a certain color font, that would take precedence. Its not like I was see "my" color. But if I thought of the word out of that context, it would be its normal color again (usually based on the color of the first letter like described in the article). Exceptions are things like logos which have a fairly strong association with certain colors.
- keeganjw 9y ago
  It doesn't seem to. Text can be in any color and my synaesthesia stays the same. If the text itself was multicolored, maybe? I'm not sure. It doesn't come up that often.
  - adg002 9y ago
    How do you perceive the Google's logo?
    - zeta0134 9y ago
      I'm not the op, but I have the same grapheme–colour synaesthesia, and I perceive Google's logo in its original colors. But if I look at the word Google in plain text (or imagine it in my mind's eye) the coloration is different. [G] is kind of a brown, the [o]s are black, the [l] is white, and only the [e] at the end has any color, a bright green. I have to think about the individual letter associations; the brown and black dominate my perception of the word itself, but the vowels are a bit brighter. It's... kind of hard to describe, I'll admit. I guess I should stress that I don't "see" these colors. I just know, intuitively, that they are there. They are the color of the letters in my mind's eye, if you will. I suspect thus that it has nothing to do with the shape of the letters, but is a side effect of how my brain processes the language, and understands the underlying phonemes. That would also explain why the vowels seem to be so much brighter, since they are the most important letters when I'm scanning text quickly for comprehension.
liberte82 9y ago
Do you actually physically see yellow with your eyes or is it more in your mind, or a feeling of yellowness? Also do different people with synaesthaesia see the same colors for the same words?
- wickawic 9y ago
  I can answer the second question, which is 'no'.
- evincarofautumn 9y ago
  With my grapheme→colour and word→colour synaesthesia, it’s definitely in my mind—when I look at the letter A, for example, my brain has the same reaction as if I were looking at a yellow object, even though I can see that it’s not actually yellow. An upside of synaesthesia is that I have very good clerical accuracy, which is helpful for programming—typographical errors “stick out” because things appear the wrong colour. A downside is that I can’t really use syntax highlighting, because I find it distracting. This is what my terminal Emacs looks like: https://imgur.com/m76W8eF https://imgur.com/m76W8eF (with soft wrapping because there’s not really a line length limit in this codebase).
FractalNerve 9y ago
hmm, I'm not sure but I think there are many people with hidden synaesthesia like you, especially other forms that we don't know yet. Or there are different types of synaesthesia-like neurological phenomenons. Unsure if the government/doctors or schools should help you use/detect these or not. I didn't think about this, but does feeling a smell or scent in different emotional strengths also count to synaesthesia?
explainplease 9y ago
For synaesthesia-challenged Emacs users: https://i.imgur.com/ZQkgI3U.png https://i.imgur.com/ZQkgI3U.png
- hackpert 9y ago
  That looks so incredibly wrong.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

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amyjess 9y ago

I remember the huge lightbulb that went off in my head when I discovered that number forms are a form of synesthesia. I've had number forms all my life. I never knew where they came from or why, so the way I see numbers finally made sense when I found out that it was part of a condition I've actually heard of before. I also have some weak chromagraphemia, but the number forms are much stronger. For example, here's a rough approximation of how I see the numbers 0-100. It's not perfect because it's hard to do suble slopes in text. 69 70 71 66 67 68 72 73 74 63 64 65 75 76 77 60 61 62 78 79 80 29 30 31 59 81 28 32 58 82 27 33 57 83 26 34 56 84 25 35 55 85 24 36 54 86 23 37 53 87 22 38 52 88 21 39 51 89 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 This also applies to years, by the way. Just add 1900 to all these numbers and you have my visualization of the 20th century. I find it amusing that the Great Depression is a downward slope... but so is the boom of the '80s.

pawelk 9y ago

I think I have now remembered the moment I became aware of my synesthesia. As a kid I was a bit of an art geek, I liked to read on art history and theory. Reading about Kandinsky there was an introduction that he had some kind of unique way of mapping sounds to colors, followed by a quote from Kandinsky. I was like "This is strange indeed, he got like half of the colors wrong!". Then the book proceeded to explain synesthesia and everything became clear.