When saying something about a number, never describe it by calling it color. Your friends will look at you funny after you realise you said "Four is a pretty color."
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Why would you even say 4 is a pretty number? They should look at you weird even if you said it right.
not number, colour. synesthesia is a neurological condition that means people kinda mix up their senses. they see numbers as not just numbers but as colours too or colours have scents associated with them and so on. it varies a lot from person to person. go look it up, it is really interesting.
It’s pretty common in mild form, from what I gather. I’ve always associated different colors with different numbers, but I don’t mix them up. I just see them as different colors in my head. For instance, 4 is yellow to me. Same with days of the week and months of the year. I think the month thing is partly from a year calendar we had in kindergarten; every month was a different color.
Interesting, four is orangey to me.
four is kinda bluish to me. three is purple. 2 is red. i have no idea if i have synesthesia or i just think too much, i’m guessing the latter
i also tend to assiciate certain people with colours. all my friends have a unique colour to me.
Eh, I dunno about the “thinking too much” thing. For me it’s always been an automatic “this number is this color” in my mind. It’s so common, it seems, that it’s a wonder they put a name to it. I read somewhere that when people associate colors with letters, A is almost always red. Makes sense because when you’re a little kid learning the alphabet, most people say “A is for Apple.” I can’t help but wonder if it’s not more of a product of learning environments than anything else. Colored alphabet blocks, decorations in kindergarten rooms, etc.
True synesthesia is an involuntary, automatic thing rather than a semantic association between the two types of stimuli (i.e. colours and letters) and it isn’t limited to the perception of language, any sense can potentially be ‘crossed’ with any other but grapheme (letters and numbers) colour synesthesia is one of the more common forms (as is sound-colour synesthesia, where sounds have different colours).
I do it with letters, numbers, months, and days of the week. Always have, but I think the months part is at least partially connected to that year calendar I mentioned from kindergarten. I don’t remember it clearly, but I’m sure that’s the reason why I see February as red.
Though for me it’s always kind of vague. I don’t see patterns or anything like that as other people have mentioned. I’d be guessing mine is a very mild form, if that’s what’s going on with me at all.
I do it with musical notes (each note is the same colour repeated in every octave), but I sometimes wonder if that’s because when I was about 3 or 4, I had a toy piano with coloured stickers on to help you learn the different notes. If I think about that piano, I can’t remember what colours are where, but if I hear an E natural, for example, I see it as light grey.
I had a student once tell me that my voice is a deep pinkish red wine color. She was kind of shy and embarrassed to tell me, but she said she had to let me know because it was such a wonderful color.
That’s really rather sweet!
So I am in a minority of people who don’t do this for anything?
My sister and I both see smells as colors. My mother was looking at us like idiots one day when we talked about how much we loved the yellowy smell that was wafting through our house (turns out someone was mulching a pine tree).
I was implying that even if she got it right, as in saying number instead of accidentally saying color it would still be a weird thing to say.
Yes, but she didn’t mess up and accidentally say ‘color’ rather than ‘number’ she simply absentmindedly made a statement that made sense to her, without fully thinking through that it wouldn’t make sense to others (that is at least how I interpreted it)
Although, as typographer I would have to completely disagree with your statement that saying ‘four is a pretty number’ warrants such a ‘wtf’ reaction. I could wax poetic about the letter Q, really
Qs are pretty
You need smarter friends, like ones who have heard of synethesia.
I don’t have it myself, but I’m endlessly fascinated with people who do.
i first heard of it in a neurobiology lecture and have been fascinated ever since. i know some folk find it hard but other people enjoy it. apparently a higher proportion of musicians/artists have synesthesia.
That’s interesting about musicians and artists. I’ve always had an ear for music since I was tiny, and as I said above, I’ve also always imagined different numbers to have specific colors. Never knew there could be a link between the two. My mom was a musician as well (there’s a LOT of it on both sides of my family) and I remember having conversations with her about which colors are what color, and days of the week and such. I always thought I just had a weird imagination until I heard of synethesia.
I won’t lie, I think this sounds incredibly cool. Would I like to test it out for a day? Most definitely. I’d like to experience it for even about 30 minutes. I think it would give music an extra facet and make it even better than it currently is.
Ever since I’ve heard about synesthesia, I’ve really wanted to experience it, but alas, it’s not something that shows up randomly. I think you’re spot on about the artist/music thing. I am utterly devoid of any artistic talent, only see numbers and letters as dull, dead print on paper and only experience environmental sensations with the intended sensory organ. How boring.
Nope, can’t learn from this fail at all.
I had a form of synesthesia where every time I heard someone speak in a different language, and occasionally for English (being my first language) I immediately saw a coloured pattern across my vision. Low German was the most beautiful, with two sets of beige waves. High German was some kind of choppy red (I can’t remember the exact pattern), and English was a really dull and boring set of blue blocks.
For reasons unknown I stopped having it sometime in high school, and it has yet to return.
I love having Synesthesia. It makes life a LOL.
^^ This
Permanent acid trip.
My daughter has had Synesthesia since she was little Numbers and Letters are male or female and have personalities. 1-9 for numbers. Anything more then that are couples. She knows EXACTLY how well each “couple” interact and if they get along or not.
When she was young, she used to tell me stories about the numbers and how they interact lol
But she’s good at Math now!
That’s not synesthesia, although it is related. It is called ordinal linguistic personification. I experienced it when I was young. I also repeated the ends of sentences under my breath without realizing it (still do from time to time), and often while walking to school I would hear unintelligible, soft, whispering voices. Associated with those voices would be the image of strange elliptical figures oscillating up and down, kind of like seeing an oil well pump going up and down.
My brother has color/number synesthesia. I once saw him pick out the single numeral ’6′ in a picture full of thousands of ’9′s in under one second. It was easy, because he saw it in a different color. If you turned the picture upside down so all the 9′s became 6′s and vice-versa, the colors would NOT change, because he was aware of it and knew that the 6′s were actually upside-down 9′s. If he walked away for an hour and came back and looked at the picture upside down, the colors were now reversed.
All of my close male relatives from my father’s side experience these things and most of them suffer from some psychiatric disorder, my father and brother are obsessive-compulsive, my father’s brother is schizophrenic.
That’s really interesting, Scotty. Ordinal linguistic personification – that sounds like something I had as a kid. Things, words, letters and numbers were “friendly” or “clever” or “beautiful” or similar. I used to sit for hours with a deck of cards doing role-play games with them because each card’s “personality” was easier for me to “get to know” than things like dolls, which I couldn’t relate to really and never saw as anything other than lifeless objects.
I would also strongly associate certain words with unrelated feelings and sounds – not consciously, they would just “have words” that went with them. I am pretty sure they didn’t become linked through emotional experience because there were so many of them, but of course that’s possible. Several of them are obviously onomatopoeic though. Some of them still turn up in my head from time to time, 25 years later. For example the name “James” or the idea of a person called James has a sound like someone drawing a stick along a radiator (the kind that has a sort of corrugated front).
I should probably mention that autistic spectrum disorder runs in my family and I have Asperger’s, so it might be linked to that.
There’s nothing wrong with that! Synesthesia is awesome! However, a few things about it:
1. 7 is much prettier than 4
2. The best color comes from a language, not a number, the language in question being German
3. What other types of synesthesia, if any, do you have? Lexical isn’t the only one, after all.
One is dark blue. Two is yellow. Three is red. Four is indigo. Five is orange. Six is yellow, too. Seven is dark purple (almost black). Eight is blue. Nine is dark green. Ten is black. Eleven is yellow. Twelve is green. Thirteen is orange-yellow. Fourteen is purple. Synesthesia is fun.
that is the stupidest thing i have ever heard.
Does anyone NOT have synesthesia? Do ‘normal’ people just see everything as a black and white word written in size 14 times new roman font in their minds? Ugh, I am so tired of this “you’re special!” climate we’re raising our children in.
you are having difficulty telling the difference between normal brain functioning and synesthesia.
most people intuitively connect ideas like letters and certain colors or numbers and tastes or anything of that nature.
for instance four seems like a pale yellow color to me.
synesthesia is widely different and exhibits in a much more pronounced form. their brain is genuinely combining the senses to a certain extent. it’s an interesting psychological condition.
Hm, maybe I don’t actually have it then. Four does seem like a pale yellow to me as well, though, but it’s vague and only in my imagination. But I still wonder if it’s linked to having musical talent, even if it isn’t true synesthesia.
I have sound/color and number and letter/color synesthesia.
7 is gold to me
6 is red
and 1 is white
Also, the sound of any guitar is red to me
Trumpets sound yellow
and clarinets sound blue
I actually did a presentation in my health class about Synesthesia. Nobody had heard of it at all! But everybody in class found it fascinating. One of the students failed that year and did a presentation on it the year after because of me. There are actually 2 types:
1. The type most people have, where they simply associate’s colors with smells, sounds with tastes, etc. They don’t physically experience these sensations. In fact, almost everybody has this type .
2. The more rare form, where you PHYSICALLY experience this. The taste of oranges feels like rubber balls rolling on your arms, or a song by Led Zeppelin tastes like rotting meat. (Nothing against Led Zeppelin, btw). And it’s not all fun and games for people with this either. When it’s strong enough, it can really ruin a persons life. Imagine never being able to listen to the radio for fear of some horrible, and powerful taste? Or eating chicken and feeling spikes in the palm of your hand?
Certain colours are incredibly abrasive for me, and can be like sandpaper or another rough texture. Harsh artificial orange I absolutely have to keep out of my vision range or it becomes painful.
While it isn’t always harsh, a sunset can smell quite lovely, I do like feeling the textures of things before I see them. I often get a series of tastes from experiencing the texture of an object that can override the unpleasant reaction to the colour.
Recently, though, I’ve started an epilepsy medication that seems to seriously reduce the synesthesia… I miss some of it, but it is really just a relief to not be overwhelmed by sensation.
I’ve done that many a time. And for some reason fanta fruit twist tastes pink.
I have synesthesia. I never even realized it was a condition until I read about it a few months ago. I’ve always seen 1 as brown, 2 as blue, 3 as orange, 4 as purple, 5 is yellow, 6 is green, and so on. And sometimes I get it with other things as well. Like, I know what question marks and exclamation points sound like, and what pink tastes like. And a huge thing for me is feeling music. I can feel the instruments’ notes as though they’re physical objects. They kind of flow in a stream, or pulse up and down on a flat plane, depending on the song. This is probably why I’ve always liked instrumental music a lot more than music with lyrics, because I can dissect each “piece” of it. But I never knew this all actually had a name.
Yeah, I had the same problem last time I got stoned…
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This past Christmas, my father mentioned synesthesia because he remembered a comment I made as a child about math being hard because of all the different colors. (that was partially an excuse. Math was hard because it made me panic because.. well, let’s just say I have an entirely reasonable dislike of nuns which then extends to religion in general.) I do remember actually seeing numbers in colors, though; strange rainbows on black backgrounds that made me vaguely nervous and uneasy. I don’t really remember exactly what that looked like now, but I still see numbers a bit differently; 1-10 are white on black then 11-19 are black on white. The rest of the numbers alternate depending on where I start counting and 100 is always black on white. And friendly, oddly enough. 8 always felt somewhat smug and 9… arrogant. I have noticed that calendars and the days of the week seem to have a similar pattern to them as the numbers do. January is black on white, but then February, March and April are white on black. May starts white on black then becomes black on white. June, July and August are all black on white (though August sometimes has a green tinge to it) And the rest of the year is white on black. Occasionally there’s a hint of color to days of the month, but it has more to do with holidays associated with the days than anything else.
It’s an interesting disorder, but the extreme cases sound like they could be a little scary.
idk what this is, but my numbers and letters have always had genders and personalities. Days of the week and months too.