do you have synesthesia? are you a synesthete?

Things are usually expressed in visual terms, mostly sounds, but also other stuff. Most often it's music manifest as loose, coloured shapes, although this is often motivated by say, what a record sleeve looks like, though. Often essays I'm working on tend to take on colours if I've been working on them a long time, and especially if I do late into the night.

I didn't realize this was something when I was like 19. I can remember as a kid thinking I would know what different colour markers would taste like.

I don't think there's much practical application for this, but as I mentioned in the other thread, I have actually paired tracks in mixes because they had complimentary colours.

For me it's not annoying because it's just part of my cognitions. It's hard to imagine not having it, it would be like "listening to music with my eyes closed," as I've remarked in the past, as if there was something that should be there missing.

I have grapheme -> colour synaesthesia. Same story, didn't realise everyone else didn't see text that way until I studied it in college. I guess it's the least impressive form of syn. as it's not even linking two different senses - just two forms of visual input. A word will take on the colour of its constituent letters, but the initial letter defines the word's main colour.

Pros - I'm convinced it's part of the reason for me being able to spell and spot spelling errors so well - a word looks doubly wrong if it's spelt wrong, as the colour is off too.

Cons - never experienced any downside until I tried to use the SF Muni. All the lines J, K, L, M, N are represented by colours on the Muni map - oddly the colours they use for this group of letters are what I 'see' for these letters - but they are all associated with the wrong ones! Because the map requires you to look at the letter only as a 'key' then look at the correct colour line, there's been many a time I've been scratching my head over the purple line because to me that's J, when actually the purple line is L or something. It wouldn't be a problem if they were all yellows or browns, it's just freaky that the map colours are almost exactly right for a different line letter.

Some people react in total disbelief that this is a real thing, how I see the world (well, text). I have to say I react the same way when another synaesthete tries to tell me E is RED or some such bs. (It's obviously yellow).

The hardest thing is trying to explain that you don't 'hallucinate' the colours - you just 'know' the colour it is. I would describe it a little like seeing something familiar in a black and white photo - you know the colour it ~is~, and you couldn't mistake it for a different colour, even if you're seeing it in greyscale. But that doesn't really describe it that well.

I always thought synesthesia sounded like a lot of fun.

as a child, i always attributed male/female attritubes to letters and numbers. not sure if this is synaethesia.

a little bit. sounds as shapes/images mainly. moreso when tired.

maybe you're french?

bass(plucked, deep) is like a doughnut/torus; often red. a sudden shout is a spearhead moving quickly. flute is a tilde-like squiggle, sometimes cyan. like Not the Real Village People, don't "see" or "hallucinate" this stuff, it just forms part of my perception; like something in peripheral vision i guess.

I don't think there's much practical application for this, but as I mentioned in the other thread, I have actually paired tracks in mixes because they had complimentary colours.

this def. i think i definitely have this, a lot of stuff tends to come out as being colours (sounds esp) and most things feel like they have a visual element, tho usually one that is not exactly describable.

yeah, i mean i like how much of the new vampire weekend album sounded like pastel pink, yellow and cyan

i wish i had known this was actually a thing sooner, i only heard of it like last summer, woulda made a few more art school crits more coherent u kno

wasn't there some thread where like everyone on ilm was claiming they had more synesthesia that everyone else

than

I don't have synaesthesia.

i don't have it either, but wikipedia says this is a type of synesthesia, and i do this to an extent, but i don't think of it as a thing.

i mean, sort of like cutty, i did that gender thing with letters and numbers (though i didn't always have to articulate in my brain "seven is female" or anything like that), and i had an easier time learning genders of words in french because even the non-obvious ones would just seem right, and i always use mnemonic devices i can't even explain to another person because stuff just seems to be organized by associating multiple seemingly unrelated ideas. but it's not like seeing colors or anything, it's just how my brain is structured. i don't know how other people memorize stuff though, it could be the same.

^^^^yep, me too, letters/numbers/days of the week/months of the year have always naturally assumed definite identifiable genders

i had an easier time learning genders of words in french because even the non-obvious ones would just seem right

Is it the object or the sound of the word which has a gender? (partly out of curiosity and also wondering whether it would help/hinder if you learnt e.g. German where some of the same objects have nouns of a different gender)

Synaesthesia sounds super rad and I have wished I had it, though I gather it's actively annoying to some people. I do wonder, though, if some people with a milder association of numbers or letters to colours might have had e.g. an alphabet wall frieze as a kid that they're picking up the colours from rather than actual neuroaesthetic crosswiring. But that's probably just envy on my part.

xpost
Would you say this is an automatic thing, e.g. when you see/hear these things does a "feeling" of male/female encroach upon you, or is it more that if you were asked whether xyz was male/female you'd be able to answer?
With synaesthesia it's a sensory thing that's always there, you can't turn it off. But I find the gender thing interesting.

When I was a very small child, I processed tactile information in purely color terms, but I grew out of it pretty quickly.

I scared the shit out of my mom one morning, as I had slept on my arm wrong, so it had fallen asleep, and the resulting pins and needles caused me to run down the stairs screaming "MY ARM FEELS PINK! MY ARM FEELS PINK!"

(I am still slightly unnerved by certain pinks)

I wish I did still have it, as I feel like it would come in handy trying to make color decisions in film and photos.

working with colour etc for a living everyday, i'm pretty sure if i had synesthesia my job would be impossible. am i wrong?

Would depend on what kind. If each colour made you experience a taste then yeah that could get pretty disgusting. The best one I've heard of is some guy who actually felt words e.g. some words were round and smooth like a pillar or spiky and painful.

btw if I didn't have it I would think there must be some childhood association like with a wall frieze - but I can't imagine I ever would have had one with the weird range of colours I have (some are iridescenty kind of shades, others very strong bright colours, many shades of brown, and a couple don't really have a strong colour assoc'd with them).

it's more of a feeling in the background for me, if i want to turn it into something to help me remember something i have to force myself to recognize it

they moved the synesthete next to me at work

working with colour etc for a living everyday, i'm pretty sure if i had synesthesia my job would be impossible. am i wrong?

I'd venture to say you are. Unless you have hardcore synesthesia where you're really confusing senses, I don't see why it would get in the way of working well with colour. The point about not hallucinating colour, and the black and white photo analogy is OTM, it's not like your actually tasting anything when you see the colour red, it's just a kind of knowledge in the back of your head that's there, which, for me at least, you're liminally conscious of. I think the fact that I'm naturally a very visually and very colour oriented person is consistent with my synesthesia.

wasn't there some thread where like everyone on ilm was claiming they had more synesthesia than everyone else

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, May 3, 2010 5:16 PM (Yesterday)

probably. synesthesia is the perfect subject for bizarre art school chest-beating, like...

synesthete A: "the number 73 is salmon-colored, octagonal and gender-neutral."
synesthete B: "no you are wrong, the number 73 smells like early Merzbow, tastes like hunger, and feels like warm cherry Faygo splashing against a freshly-painted clown face."
synesthete A: "wow, your brain, it is so quirky and unconventional."

this is the type of argument where everybody loses.

Would you say this is an automatic thing, e.g. when you see/hear these things does a "feeling" of male/female encroach upon you, or is it more that if you were asked whether xyz was male/female you'd be able to answer?
With synaesthesia it's a sensory thing that's always there, you can't turn it off. But I find the gender thing interesting.

It's kind of an instinctive, subconscious thing, and it's subtle - I don't look at a letter and immediately think "man" or "woman" the way I would when seeing an actual person, presumably because of the lack of any emotional investment in the matter. But the perception is definitely there, and it's more elaborate than a simple matter of male-female: it's a sliding scale, a ranking from "most masculine" to "most feminine". Other non-organic concepts that assume a similar ranking are numbers, weekdays, months, geometric shapes, and colours.

is there some thread abt musicians who love saying they have synaeshesia or did i make that up

PRobably happened in the blood orange thread

^ never saw this reply, but it looks like you were correct. reminded of it because of -

"Lorde has a neurological condition known as sound-to-color synesthesia — when she hears certain notes and sounds, corresponding colors appear — and she describes making music in intensely visual terms. "

lol from avey tare's wikipedia -

In an interview with Brightest Young Things, he implied that he has synesthesia and associates sound with visuals.[12] He later clarified that although he has talked about it a lot in interviews he in fact does not have synesthesia. [13]