Synaesthesia - what color is letter A to you, or C?

[Winnetou88]

Hello everyone. I have color graphem synesthesia and just found a really interesting syn voting website: http://www.tukan.extra.hu

 

There you can vote what color is each letter or number in your mind and see what color many other people voted for. And I want to ask you if any of you has an idea why A is red for most synesthetes and C yellow??

[YT2095]

Interesting!

I don`t get it very much with Letters, but I do quite strongly with numbers for some reason.

 

I never knew there Was such a thing until now, I just thought it was some strange childhood "ability" that never went away.

Cool find

[Sisyphus]

I also have quite strong synesthesia of the same type. Lots of things have both color and spatial orientation* associated with them, not just letters/numbers/days of the week but almost any ordered system. The traditional ones have the strongest associations.

 

Seems like most people have the colors all wrong, though!

 

*For example, the months are arranged in a wide, flattened ring inclined about 30 degrees from horizontal, with the summer at the high end. Throughout the year "my" perspective changes so as to be at the appropriate month. Similarly, doing mental math involves a lot of whizzing around mental "space" as well as overlaying colors in different ways for different operations. It sounds chaotic, but it makes perfect sense to me, and I'm pretty sure it actually helps things become intuitive. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all if synesthesia was correlated with high spatial intelligence, either as cause or effect.

Edited October 1, 2008 by Sisyphus

[tomgwyther]

I also tend not to have a synesthesic approach to match letters/numbers with colours

I (as other do) think of numbers as 3D spacial entities.

I think of number as fractions based on these

i.e 75, 750 7500 etc are expressed as 3/4 on different 3D planes in relation to other fractions. sounds overly complex but makes sense to me!

 

 

Try this:

Days and colours usually have a strong synethesic affect, I think

 

Sunday = yellow

Monaday = blue/grey

Tuesday = green/yello

Wednesday = pink

Thurdays = Brown

Friday = White

Saturday = Red

 

Anyone else share these?

[Realitycheck]

The question is why would you associate anything with anything else other than itself?

 

I was once that way to a small extent, but mind over matter rules.

[Gilded]

The question is why would you associate anything with anything else other than itself?

 

I was once that way to a small extent, but mind over matter rules.

 

Why? How about survival? Smoke and fire, a stormy sky and lightning etc. Smoke doesn't mean there's a fire, but if your house is filled with smoke you might guess it's because your toaster has exploded and set your curtains on fire.

 

The human brain is making associations all the time. Some of them might be considered irrational, but overall it's essential that such associations are made. I don't think synaesthesia is that odd at all and is comparable to thinking that an instrumental song is sad, for example.

[Sisyphus]

The question is why would you associate anything with anything else other than itself?

 

I was once that way to a small extent, but mind over matter rules.

 

That's not really how it works. It's an involuntary association. And more than just an association, really, the letters and numbers are those colors. In some cases it moves beyond visual and spatial into other senses, as well, wherein different sounds have different shapes, colors, textures, even tastes. I've heard of severe synesthetes who have to eat in silence, since every sound has its own taste, which naturally causes chaos if you're trying to eat a meal.

[DrP]

I

Try this:

Days and colours usually have a strong synethesic affect, I think

 

Sunday = yellow

Monaday = blue/grey

Tuesday = green/yello

Wednesday = pink

Thurdays = Brown

Friday = White

Saturday = Red

 

Anyone else share these?

 

I don't have this synathesia as far as I am aware, but I somehow assosiate weekdays with colours. Almost scary how similar the colours are to yours!

 

I have:

 

Sunday - Yellow

Monday - Black/grey/brown ish

Tuesday - Yellow

Wednesday - Red/Dark Orange

Thursday - Brown

Friday - White

Saturday - Blue.

 

 

There you can vote what color is each letter or number in your mind and see what color many other people voted for. And I want to ask you if any of you has an idea why A is red for most synesthetes and C yellow??

 

I would say A = Black, B = Red, C = White D = Dark Brown, E = light Brown F = White, G = Reddish, H = White again I = pretty transparent J = yelowish........ hmm - this is strange.. I don't know why I would picture these letters with a colour to them.

 

 

Maybe it could be some conection to learning as a child - If in your first reading book it read " A is for APPLE" and there was a picture of an apple then you might asosciate A with green?? Maybe??

 

Thinking harder (kicking long term memory into overdrive) I think I had bibs as a baby with days of teh week on them. Some of them could have had colours on them as above - very vauge memory though.

[Sisyphus]

My earliest realizations about synesthesia involved days of the week. I remember being about two or three years old and asking my father why Wednesday was green. He of course had no idea what I was talking about, and I couldn't understand why not. It wasn't until years later that I even realized that not everybody thought that way.

[tomgwyther]

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks of weekdays as having colours.

I believe the reason synesthesia happens is because alot of the brain structures which deal with spacial awareness and colour are sited very close to the brain structures which deal with language and numbers.

Synethesia happens as a helping hand to though and reasoning. and is used in nearly all language.

i.e a taste can be described as 'sharp'

a sound described as 'soft'

 

theres a great BBC documentary on youtube about it, have a search

[john5746]

Hello everyone. I have color graphem synesthesia and just found a really interesting syn voting website: http://www.tukan.extra.hu

 

There you can vote what color is each letter or number in your mind and see what color many other people voted for. And I want to ask you if any of you has an idea why A is red for most synesthetes and C yellow??

 

 

http://www.neurologyreviews.com/jul02/nr_jul02_mindseye.html

 

Dr. Ramachandran has done some work in this area and posits that there may be cross-wiring between adjacent brain modules that cause this ability. My guess would be that color and sequencing would be wired very similarly in their respective modules in most people, so when cross-wiring occurs, you would get similar color/sequence patterns. He tends to use the word "defective" too much, but you can catch the meaning.

 

 

“We were struck by the fact that, if you look at the fusiform gyrus, the color area of the brain is right next to the area that deals with visual graphics and numbers, almost touching it,” Dr. Ramachandran said. He posited that some people have a gene mutation that causes either disinhibition or defective pruning of the connections between adjacent brain modules. “If there’s a gene mutation which causes defective pruning, and if it’s selectively expressed in the fusiform gyrus, where the number and color areas lie, you get cross-wiring between these areas causing number to color synesthesia.

 

“Later we stumbled on some synesthetes for whom even the days of the week and the months of the year had colors,” he added. “So we asked ourselves, what does a number have in common with the days of the week or the months in a calendar? The answer is, they’re all sequences. So my conjecture is maybe in these ‘higher’ synesthetes it’s the abstract concept of numerical sequence that gets linked to colors. Perhaps in these people the same gene is expressed in the vicinity of the angular gyrus where the abstract idea of numerical sequence is represented, and close to it is also another color area that’s further downstream from the color area in the fusiform. If the gene is expressed in the fusiform, you get a lower synesthete driven by the visual features of the grapheme: if it’s expressed higher up, near the angular gyrus, you get a higher synesthete in whom the color is evoked by the concept.”

 

Lastly, if the gene is expressed continuously everywhere you get extensive hyperconnectivity throughout the brain. “This explains, I think, why synesthesia is so much more common in artists, poets, and novelists. What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common? They use metaphor, analogy. They can take seemingly unrelated ideas and link them. For example, ‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.… Now when Shakespeare says that, do you say ‘Juliet is the sun ƒ does that mean she’s a glowing ball of fire?’ Of course not. You say, ‘she’s warm like the sun, radiant like the sun, nurturing like the sun.’ All the links are formed in your brain.

“Now, what I’m arguing is that these people have more cross-wired brains, so they can more easily relate seemingly unrelated concepts,” Dr. Ramachandran explained. “This seems quite outlandish an idea, but think about the fact that even concepts are laid out in anatomical regions, in brain maps. Once you accept that, the more extensive cross-wiring would explain the higher incidence of synesthesia in novelists, poets, and artists, if the gene is expressed more diffusely.”

[ParanoiA]

Watched an interesting program on this last night. Some guy had a cardboard cut out of a blob looking object, and a cut out of a star looking object with sharp edges. He asked folks to assign the names "Buma" and "KiKi" to each shape, and overwhelmingly people chose the blob to be Buma and the sharp edged star was Kiki - something like greater than 90%. I too assigned those names with those particular shapes.

 

Not the most impressive example I guess, but I found in fascinating. I can't really explain why Buma sounds dull and..well, blob-like and why Kiki sounds sharp, dagger-like. Very interesting.

[Dudde]

I would say that buma has a more fluid sound, with no sharp spikes in the tone or ...spokenness.... whereas kiki is more likely to be pronounced with a sharp intone at the i, so you have kind of an up-down, or bumpy road impression. After all, when driving on something smooth, you don't get those funny sounds you do when you drive on a road full of construction on the way to work

[Mudbird]

"buma has a more fluid sound, with no sharp spikes in the tone or ...spokenness.... whereas kiki is more likely to be pronounced with a sharp intone at the i, so you have kind of an up-down"

 

What a fascinating topic.

 

I would bet money that the graph of the actual sound waves for "buma" and "kiki" would resemble the corresponding objects to a convincing extent. I mean a more sinous curve versus one with visible sharp spikes.

[the_seraphim]

sorry... im sane

 

lol

[Tnad]

Surprising!I thought i was the only one who makes up my ideas giving things colours, sometimes gender. I tend to imagine days,hours,letters& numbers each associated with a certain colour. However, i can't tell the criteria i use.for example Tuesday seems pink.Although I like pink, tuesday is not my favourite day of the week. A looks white,C is gray and Z is blue!

[dirtyamerica]

I once read that it has something to do with how your brain processes events in early childhood..and once these cause/effect relationships are established, they stay with you for life.

 

in my personal experience of this phenomenon (realized at or before kindergarten):

 

for single digit numbers:

odds = wet

evens = dry

 

anyone else have this?

 

Other than that I have certain chapters of my life that associate with certain feelings or "thought smells" but I can't quite pin a sense to it.