synaesthesia

Synaesthesia, also commonly spelled 'synesthesia' comes from the Greek syn, for together, and aisthesis, to perceive. I will use the 'ae' spelling here because it is more appealing to me in terms of color and it looks more archaic.

It has been claimed that one in two hundred people is synaesthesic. Other data suggests one in 2000-2500. More women are than men have it and amongst artistic types (artists, musicians and the like) some researchers claim there are 6 times as many as in the general population. Others dispute this, arguing that artistic types may just be more willing to admit to it. Very often a single early experience of mentioning that the number 5 is green only to be met with uncomprehending stares, is enough to dissuade further discussion. If ever, it may be many years before she discovers she is not alone but belongs to a small but universal minority whose unusual ways of experiencing are increasingly validated by scientific research.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R
S T U V W X Y Z

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Multiple digit numbers follow the same rules: 23, 82 500

Defect or Evolutionary Advantage?
One theory describes it as a genetic defect. Apparently in utero the various senses (sight, sound, smell…) are all connected and develop together. Around the time of birth they separate. In the synaesthete this does not fully occur. Conversely, 'To many fin de siecle Romantics, synesthetes appeared to be humanity's spiritual vanguard, closer to God than the sense-segregated masses'. Like other minorities such as left handers (and there are more synaesthetes among lefthanders) and epileptics, synaesthetes have received both brickbats and bouquets!

One of the better known forms of synaesthesia is chromesthesia (which involves the pairing of color with other sensory data such as sight or taste) also mood or situation. A subset of this is chromagraphemia, which I have. I see colors seemingly externally overlaid on written material. Or if just thinking of words or numbers I perceive the colors projected on the internal visual display. It 's so compellingly vivid that although I know that my eyes are not actually perceiving colored text when I read, I would have to make an effort to not see the colors, but the black on white I know to be there.

Is the letter A always red and the number 6 yellow?
Synaesthetes each have their own systems. While the above is true for me, another will insist that their A is blue and that 6 is undoubtedly brown. Surveys have found some commonalities such as that the number zero is frequently perceived either as black, white or transparent, but there is not enough agreement to suggest a universal objective correspondance.

Individual synaesthete's systems prove to be remarkably stable over time, however. Ask me in 20 years what color C is and I will unhesitatingly tell you it's blue, not because I have remembered it but that this color always emerges along with that letter.

Other forms of synaesthesia include smelling music, tasting textures and many more. Another type I only recently discovered to be a form of synaesthesia is representation time in a spatial 3d form like a number line that you can move about in. I have this for days of the week, months of the year and also years. With days of the week, I am standing on the word of the current day, facing almost towards the future which stretches ahead and to the right. Behind and somewhat to the left, but visible, stand the large colored words of the days past, going back about 3 or 4 days, with about 3 or 4 days in front of me.
I also have a visual-spatial 3d representation for the months of the year, the years of the 20^th century and another for approximately the past 5000 years. Both of these lines slope down somewhat as they go back in time and I can turn around, look ‘down’ into the past and get a visual-spatial sense of time in relation to the present.

Putting letters together into words,
Geography would be literally

Geography

but usually some of the colors will dominate
and others will tend to lack vividness and fade out.
Dominant colors are often the letters at the beginning
of words or repeated letters. So, ‘Geography’ is ‘seen’ as a
green, yellow and black word, more like

Geography

The other colors (raph) fade down
unless each letter of the word is individually examined. Also, the colors are not perceived as discretely as appears here.
They blend or bleed into each other.
Often when I am trying to recall a word,
I will get a general sense of its
colors first and this can help retrieve it.
For the above word, geography,
the green yellow and black
would come to mind first.
Sometimes though if the
word I am looking for has a
similar coloring to another word,
I will keep retrieving the wrong one for a while.

My mother had these timelines too.
I suspect several members of that side of the family have various forms of synaesthesia. My aunt frequently uses ‘taste’ adjectives to describe something belonging to a different sense. ‘A scrumptious painting’ for example. I notice its quite common for people to do this; it is part of our culture.

Sometimes a word will not quite follow the rules. Spelled out according to the above alphabet
the name of my friend Overton should look like this.
OVERTON
But the word as a whole looks more like
OVERTON
a lovely harmony of autumn colors. From my reading it seems that it is not uncommon for letters to have more than one color depending on context. For me the letters R and T are fairly malleable, whereas N is always a browny orange and O is always black. As someone who likes to be fairly consistent it is unsettling to find ambiguities like these.

The fact that we frequently use one adjectives from one sense to describe another leads me to wonder if synaesthesia is not so rare a phenomenon as just generally overlooked. It would not surprise me if many people, if they pay attention, realize that they too have visual timelines (converting time into space is also synaesthesic) colored letters or visual music but these are so much a part of their experience they are not particularly conscious of them. Reading a message board at a synaesthesia site I realized that I have many other forms of it that I had not consciously paid attention to.

For example, I only recently became conscious of my numbers having always had associations with qualities of weight, texture, taste and even personality. 7 is a heavy, gritty number, whereas 3 is light, shiny smooth with a cool minty taste and sometimes puts on a flashy facade of confidence when it forgets its depth and superiority among numbers. 5 is busy and outgoing but with a slight tendency to depression, whereas six has an sunny optimism in accord with its cheerful yellow coloring. 4 has an earthy solidity, as does 8.
What distinguishes such descriptions as synaesthesic as opposed to deliberately imagined is that the qualities are felt to emerge into mind rather than being forced, and it is not at all satisfying if I try to apply, say, the qualities associated with 7 to another number like 3 or vice versa. Try it yourself and see what happens. Focus on a number or a word and see if anything comes to mind. Can you see it, hear it, touch taste feel it? If any sense is affected, take note of it and try another one. Is there a contrast? If so, what is it? Can you imagine reversing those qualities? How does it feel/seem when you try this?

Economically, some groups of words can be seen as one color each
This especially applies to the days of the week:
MONDAY
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
SUNDAY

As you can see, the colorings of these words do not exactly fit the general rule in which the first letter tends to dominate. I don’t know why. Perhaps in the word Sunday, I get the browny orange from the U and the N. But Saturday is a bit of a mystery because it doesn’t even contain a purple letter. Being my favorite color I think I tend to use purple as a wild card. Saturday being a holiday might be the most fun day of the week so it makes sense that it would get my favorite color. Sunday is too close to the next work week to get it. But I don’t recall ever consciously deciding what colors to use for each day.

Moods, situations and people have for me one or more colors. The color (or colors) I see when I think of a person may be based upon the colors of their name but if I know you, your color or colors will likely be based less on your name than on something else (though I cannot say quite what).
Spelled out, the word 'Chris' is Chris but my husband Chris is ‘seen’ as a rich velvety maroon, Another Chris would likely have a different color. I suspect that with people I know I receive the colors less from the word itself than from my feelings about the person. I don't claim to see auras, (am not even sure what those are) but I do not literally perceive colors around people, I am aware it’s in my mind’s eye.
Where did I get my alphabet colors from? I really don’t know. As long as I can remember they have been there. Possibly from an alphabet book before I went to school, the kind that has a big colored letter on each page, such as ‘A is for Apple.’ I loved books and used to read the same ones over and over before starting school. Or maybe in my first year at school, where at the top of the blackboard the alphabet was written in different colored chalks. But research seems to suggest that there might be other causes.
I have found synaesthesia useful as a student because I color code all my notes with markers according to topic, using a single color for each. That color usually comes from the first letter of the topic word, or otherwise from the color feeling I associate with it. Then when I need to recall all the information in an exam, I will think of the appropriate color and the information for that topic will come to mind.

Musical Notes:

C D E F G A B

In general, sharpening a note adds brightness
flattening deepens the color
making it richer.

Example, F F# and E Eb A Ab

Musical chords become a harmony of color.
D minor triad is made up of
D F A
C major is roughly:
C E G
The higher the octave a note belongs to the lighter it gets.
For example, Middle C is roughly C with the lower C looking more like C and the higher C is C and so on.
Sometimes I am able to recall how to play a piece because I remember the colors of the various notes and chords better than the names of them. All this only applies to when I play a piano. If I am listening to music, I am generally not thinking of what key it is in or which notes are being played, so my experience of music is not based on the above system. Sound instead gets converted to color according to the mood and instrumentation of it.

Famous Synaesthetes
Richard Feynman: physicist- colored letters and numbers
Franz Liszt: composer-saw colors in musical tones
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov- composer- colored musical keys
Jean Sibelius: composer- reciprocity of color and sound
Olivier Messaien: composer-producing pictures with sound
Gyorgy Ligeti: composer- associations b/w sound, color and shape
Alexander Scriabin: featured an organ that produced multihued light beams in his symphony Prometheus, the Poem of Fire.
Elvin Jones: musician- saw forms, colors and shapes when playing.
Stevie Wonder: musician
David Hockney: artist- sees colors to musical stimuli
Vladimir Nabokov: author- colored hearing when seeing and pronouncing letters

There are also what are called pseudo synaesthetes who consciously construct cross-sensory systems which like those of real syns often find expression in artist endeavors. For centuries many people have devised what they regarded as definitive systems of correspondences. But whether pseudo or genuine

Synaesthesia and Emotion
I sometimes wonder if my tendency to experience both positive or negative feeling and emotion, to sweeping, overpowering levels has something to do with these multisensory crossovers.

An unpleasant situation will conjure up colors, shapes and sounds which may cause to strengthen one's reactions.

On the positive side it probably it adds richness to the experience of life. Listening to Bach provides, in addition to sound, a vivid display of moving architectural shapes.

On a synaesthesia website, however, it says:
Despite their bizarre cognition, synesthetes have not been found to exhibit any more vulnerability to mental disturbance or illness than the general population. Their scores on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a widely used mental-health benchmark, are within normal bounds.