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I, too, experience some synethesia with letters and numbers (two is green, three is yellow, 4 is blue), but when I look at a field of clover, I don't experience

by jp57 11mo ago

I, too, experience some synethesia with letters and numbers (two is green, three is yellow, 4 is blue), but when I look at a field of clover, I don't experience a field of numbers representing the number of leaves on the individual clover stalks. In fact that seems like a weird way of perceiving nature. When I see a bird flying with its two wings outstretched, I'm not experiencing the number 2, and thus I get no sense of green.

moralestapia 11mo ago
Respectfully, I don't think synesthesia is behind OP's purported skill.
- pturing 11mo ago
  Hi, synesthesia researcher here! (1) Here's a few relevant things we know: - Synesthesia is not rare. You probably know someone that has synesthesia, even they haven't mentioned it. - There are many forms of synesthesia. Many documented forms that we know of, and very probably a bunch we haven't documented yet. - There are cases of tasks where we are able to measure enhanced performance of that task by synesthetes. (2) - While some synesthetes do have a single form of synesthesia, it is common for synesthetes to experience multiple forms. We've found cluster groups where subjects with a given form are more likely to have another form within the same cluster. From the other writings on the OP's site, we can see that they report to have at least two forms of Colored Sequence Synesthesia: Grapheme -> Color, and Day of the Week -> Color. Their report of their experience in the linked article sounds like possibly Shape -> Motion. This is a form they could have, and it's plausible that someone already known to be a multiple synesthete might also experience this. It is also plausible that someone with a Shape -> X type of synesthesia would be able use that to spot the odd shape out faster than others. ------ (1) I maintained the online synesthesia battery for a number of years while working in the Eagleman Neuroscience Lab at Baylor College of Medicine (2) Some of these are ones that allowed us to study synesthesia on a larger scale by testing online! Among those, one particularly notable form of test is Stroop Interference. Genuine synesthetes are able to respond much faster and more accurately, and we get a good clear separation between them and controls.
  - jsdalton 11mo ago
    That all sounds very interesting. As someone who has synesthesia, I’d be interested if you still maintain those tests you refer to?
    - pturing 11mo ago
      I'm not currently active with it myself, but the site is still here: https://synesthete.org https://synesthete.org Back when I was handling it, we were still using Flash for most of the interactive tests, because that was how you had to do it when it was first built circa 2007. Obviously those would have had to be redone in HTML5 since then to keep it working on modern browsers.
thangalin 11mo ago
The main protagonist in my novel experiences synethesia. She talks about numbers having colours. To help ensure consistency throughout the novel, I developed a text editor (KeenWrite) that allows me to refer to externally defined variables within the prose, such as: syn_1: black syn_2: purple syn_3: red syn_4: gold syn_5: blue syn_6: silver syn_7: yellow syn_8: brown syn_11: teal syn_16: orange It's tempting to change the colour map based on your abilities. How far does your colour mapping go and what other "columbers" (that's what the protagonist calls them) do you perceive?

by jp57 11mo ago

moralestapia 11mo ago

Respectfully, I don't think synesthesia is behind OP's purported skill.

pturing 11mo ago
Hi, synesthesia researcher here! (1) Here's a few relevant things we know: - Synesthesia is not rare. You probably know someone that has synesthesia, even they haven't mentioned it. - There are many forms of synesthesia. Many documented forms that we know of, and very probably a bunch we haven't documented yet. - There are cases of tasks where we are able to measure enhanced performance of that task by synesthetes. (2) - While some synesthetes do have a single form of synesthesia, it is common for synesthetes to experience multiple forms. We've found cluster groups where subjects with a given form are more likely to have another form within the same cluster. From the other writings on the OP's site, we can see that they report to have at least two forms of Colored Sequence Synesthesia: Grapheme -> Color, and Day of the Week -> Color. Their report of their experience in the linked article sounds like possibly Shape -> Motion. This is a form they could have, and it's plausible that someone already known to be a multiple synesthete might also experience this. It is also plausible that someone with a Shape -> X type of synesthesia would be able use that to spot the odd shape out faster than others. ------ (1) I maintained the online synesthesia battery for a number of years while working in the Eagleman Neuroscience Lab at Baylor College of Medicine (2) Some of these are ones that allowed us to study synesthesia on a larger scale by testing online! Among those, one particularly notable form of test is Stroop Interference. Genuine synesthetes are able to respond much faster and more accurately, and we get a good clear separation between them and controls.
- jsdalton 11mo ago
  That all sounds very interesting. As someone who has synesthesia, I’d be interested if you still maintain those tests you refer to?
  - pturing 11mo ago
    I'm not currently active with it myself, but the site is still here: https://synesthete.org https://synesthete.org Back when I was handling it, we were still using Flash for most of the interactive tests, because that was how you had to do it when it was first built circa 2007. Obviously those would have had to be redone in HTML5 since then to keep it working on modern browsers.

thangalin 11mo ago

The main protagonist in my novel experiences synethesia. She talks about numbers having colours. To help ensure consistency throughout the novel, I developed a text editor (KeenWrite) that allows me to refer to externally defined variables within the prose, such as: syn_1: black syn_2: purple syn_3: red syn_4: gold syn_5: blue syn_6: silver syn_7: yellow syn_8: brown syn_11: teal syn_16: orange It's tempting to change the colour map based on your abilities. How far does your colour mapping go and what other "columbers" (that's what the protagonist calls them) do you perceive?