Category: Let's talk
Ok, I just found out I am even more abnormal than I originally thought. Anyone else have this, basicly what it is, is when you hear a number or a word, or letter you see a color for that number or letter in your mind.
for example I can hear the number 28 and see white and black in my mind.
or I can hear the word mom and see red white red. I've done this ever sence I can remember and I allways do it!
I have herd of this before. It's some sort of increased perception or a different way of perceiving things. Quite a few people actually like it. Tell me, does it help you at all?
I have herd of this before. It's some sort of increased perception or a different way of perceiving things. Quite a few people actually like it. Tell me, does it help you at all?
Well, that's hard to say, I mean as far back as I can think I have done it so I can't remember ever not doing it! I've always had a thing about remembering phone numbers and the like. so it's possible that's the reason.
I've kinda just started scratching the surface in reading about all this so a lot of it is still a bit knew.
I did write one of the Doctors that's done a lot of research on this topic. One thing I was curious about is how common this is among blind people. He said "Actually, synesthesia is more common in (congenitally) blind individuals
compared to baseline prevalence. Synesthesia can be acquired because of
adult-onset blindness as well."
Its a blending of the senses in synesthesia the person can see colours in relation to sound E.G music ect and they taste shapes...I'd love it in a way but after a while the condition would become irritating .
I do that to. Never realized it until you said it though.
The condition is more common than many people think, though many with synesthiesia fear being labelled strange due to the difficulty in explaining their experiences to others..personally I'm fascinated by it .
That's interesting. I also picture colors when I hear something and when I read/see words in my mind, and also when I touch something. For instance, if I think
of each day of the week, I can picture each day being a certain color, or sometimes I can picture other words in a color. With sounds, I think of light colors if I hear high-pitched sounds and dark colors for low-pitched ones. And if I'm walking through somewhere, or if I touch something, I think in my mind how it would look.
Leilani
Sounds like you got it too, welcome to the club grin. I forgot that I do it wit days of the week as wel.
in my mind I se this rectangle of squares one for each day.
monday is red brown, tuesday tan pink, wed is kind of a darker tan pink with some red in it, thirs is a blue purple, friday is white saturday is black and sunday is green!
sometimes i see colors but there in such a shade or contrast that I don't really know the word for them! It can be difficult to explain!
Right now I'm really curious as I've never actually come across someone with this perceptual condition before. I've herd of it as I say but I've never met anybody that actually has the condition. Do peoples voices also come through in colours as well? If so, can their moods also be represented by colours as well? or doesn't it work like that. I'm asking because you mention about different pitched sounds being represented by different colours, so am wondering if the same affect is had with voice and perhaps moods etc. Yes this is interesting.
If you are wondering where I have herd of the condition, I used to watch the programme sightings. Trouble is, you never quite know what to and not to believe do you.
Here is a website that I have found has everything You would want to know about it!
http://home.comcast.net/~sean.day/index.html
I pulled this from the website encase anyone wants to know.
Definition of "synesthesia"
Synesthesia is the general name for a related set (a "complex") of various cognitive states. Synesthesia may be divided into two general, somewhat overlapping
types. The first, which I sometimes call "synesthesia proper", is as described above, in which stimuli to a sensory input will also trigger sensations
in one or more other sensory modes. The second form of synesthesia, which I call "cognitive" or "category synesthesia", involves synesthetic additions
to culture-bound cognitive categorizational systems. In simpler words, with this kind of synesthesia, certain sets of things which our individual cultures
teach us to put together and categorize in some specific way – like letters, numbers, or people's names – also get some kind of sensory addition, such
as a smell, color or flavor. The most common forms of cognitive synesthesia involve such things as colored written letter characters (graphemes), numbers,
time units, and musical notes or keys. For example, the synesthete might see, about a foot or two before her (the majority of synesthetes are female),
different colors for different spoken vowel and consonant sounds, or perceive numbers and letters, whether conceptualized or before her in print, as colored.
A friend of mine, Deborah, always perceives the letter "a" as pink, "b" as blue, and "c" as green, no matter what color of ink they are printed with.
Synesthesia is additive; that is, it adds to the initial (primary) sensory perception, rather than replacing one perceptual mode for another. With my colored
musical instruments, I both hear and "see" the sounds; the visual images don't replace the audial sensations. Both sensory perceptions may thus become
affected and altered in the ways they function and integrate with other senses. Synesthesia is generally "one-way"; that is, for example, for a given
synesthete, tastes may produce synesthetic sounds, but sounds will not produce synesthetic tastes. However, there have been a few rare cases of synesthetes
who have had "bi-directional" synesthesia, in which, for example, music induces (synesthetic) colors and seeing colors induces (synesthetic) sounds – the
correspondences, however, are not the same in both directions!
Regarding synesthesia “proper”, stimuli to one sense, such as smell, are involuntarily simultaneously perceived as if by one or more other senses, such
as sight or/and hearing. For example, I myself have three types of synesthesiae: The sounds of
musical instruments
will sometimes make me see certain colors, about a yard in front of me, each color specific and consistent with the particular instrument playing; a piano,
for example, produces a sky-blue cloud in front of me, and a tenor saxophone produces an image of electric purple neon lights. I also have had
colored taste
and smell sensations; for example, the taste of espresso coffee can make me see a pool of dark green oily fluid about two feet away from me.
thanks for posting this. i find it interesting
Wow!! Dawson!!! This is so interesting! I've heard of people having it but never really understood much about it till you explained it. That is so cool!!!
*sexy*
To the question about voices and moods coming out in color, personally, when I hear a voice, I can picture a color for that voice, although I think it mostly has to do with pitch, but say if there are two deep voices but they are different in how they sound, I would picture maybe like one a dark brown and the other a more reddish color. Also, if it was something like singing and there were also instruments along with it, I'd see a color for the singer's voice and also colors for the instruments being played. I've read about people who already think of sound as color before they play or when they just think of a music thing, but I have to hear something and then I can picture the colors while I hear it. I don't think I can just picture colors of something before I touch/hear it.
Leilani
I find this fascinating.Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had synesthesia, he would see great bubbles of colour, whenever he played the piano. So I can only imagine how a performance of the Magic flute would have looked to him. I wonder if he composed so much in order to see the colours, and if they had any afect on his music.. smile
I'd wonder that too. I think that's interesting and cool when I hear of musicians having it, and I'd wonder the same thing; I would think it does. *smile*
I know the sounds and probably also the textures I like and don't like can depend on the colors I'm seeing with them. For instance, I hated when during my choir class in high school, when we would have to sing in higher pitches for practice. I would never do it and hated listening to the class do it because it would hurt my eyes, like if you were looking at a bright light. Also, some voices are nice because I see a nice color not too bright and not too dark when I hear them.
I agree that this is just an interesting topic. I'm not sure how long I've even had this. It's weird because my eyes were described as dead when I got them checked during high school, but I personally never felt myself going totally blind because I guess the visual part of my brain has always filled in whatever I hear and touch with colors. The only way that I knew I couldn't see was because I was no longer able to see print on a page by the fifth grade (including with visual aids), and I think I lost my light perception soon after that. It's hard to know exactly when that part was though because I felt like I could still see, and my eyes have always been sensitive to sunlight, so my vision wasn't very helpful anyway after I became unable to read print. It actually took a time during high school of family members shining a light in my eyes without me knowing for me to know for sure that I was totally blind.
I'm curious. For anyone who has this, does your synesthesia affect things you like or dislike, for instance a certain sound or word because of the color you see with it? What I like or dislike doesn't always depend on that of course, but some things do as I'd mentioned earlier.
I have it to... done the same thing as you guys! I always thought it was weird and could never really explain it to anyone.
So for any lifers with this condition, how do you actually picture color if you have never seen what it looks like?
I know, for instance, where on the light spectra can be found pink, vs. red, what primary colors mix to make what, etc. but it is all intellectual: colors possess no emotional feelings for me as I have never experienced colors.
Even among sighted people, there are many who do not have the sensitivity to experience them in the same way that, say, my daughter does: she's a photographer and even entering a room and seeing something, she's already got how that would go into a picture.
Plus, as totally blind people, we've seen with objective curiosity how two people can fight ferociously over a minor difference in light frequencies, as to the name or perceived texture of a color. I have, in factr, seen them both technically inaccurate - what they were fighting over was digital media which can be precisely measured as to where the foreground and background color schemes appear on the spectrum. So I am curious how you developed a sense: you're not picturing the words for the colors, but somehow can acquire an understanding that exceeds an intellectual one.
Interestingly, I wonder what evolutionary purpose this ability serves. I'll have to read about it - I'd initially dismissed it on account of it sounding like the aura or other people, who say you have to believe it to see it. I only wear the Emperor's new clothes when in the shower or otherwise engaged in Emperor's-new-clothes type activities, so don't really buy the 'you-have-to-believe-it-to-see-it' type thinking.
But if it's just a crossing of the senses, input by one and transfer interpretation as though input by another, that seems conceivable. Especially if, as they claim now, our brains really do resemble digital processors. Maybe just a bug, where signal traveling on one pathway arcs and is then traveling on a different pathway, to be interpreted by what would be the biological equivalent of a different process module or even transducer.
Anyway hope it's more interesting than it is annoying. And, I wonder if your sensitivity decreases with age: I have been glad to lose sensitivity to perfect pitch over the years. It used to drive me nuts as a very young boy to hear competing tones from what amounts to normal industrial noise. Again, I'd say a bug, most probably, as I'm not sure what practical purpose it serves the system as a whole.
I honestly can't answer your question, Leo, but I used to be able to see more than I can now, and what I used to be able to see was colours. Ironically, as a child, I had no idea what colours went together, but since I lost mot of the rest of my sight I seem to have a knack for colour matching while I make jewelry. Perhaps it's more the patterns than anything else, but even though I can't emotionally connect with colours, I can combine them... I am making NO sense!
Well if you used to see more, you have access to that data. Whether you think you understand it or not probably makes little difference: you can in fact interpret it in a way a totally blind from birth person cannot.
Even the capacity to distinguish between light and dark is radically inconceivable from an experiential point of view, at least to someone who has never seen.
Hmmmm... I believe you may be right
I have been low vision to LP most of my life and will eventually go total, but I have always been extremely visual. I see conglomerations of color while listening to music that sometimes take form of fret charts and help me learn to play but more often look like the eye candy feature in Windows Media Player. I have also always seen Braille and print numbers in my head, always having the same corresponding colors no matter if they're in Braille or print. Some colors are distinguishable and bright, whereas others are more obscure. I only see as well in my mind and dreams as I have in real life. The Braille mind helps greatly with basic mental math, and I often beat even my math whiz of a boyfriend. I also see colors when I smell certain scents and taste certain foods. In addition, I have been known to feel of something, like a fabric, and imagine what it looks like. Similarly, when I was getting my wisdom teeth out, I wasn't put all the way under. Being a redhead, I'm remotely resistent to anaesthetics, so I unfortunately remember a lot of what happened. What was enhanced by the medication, however, was my synaesthesia. My grandmother placed her hand on my leg, and when I closed my eyes, I basically saw an obscured, almost infrared picture as if I was looking in a mirror on the ceiling, with just her hand on my left leg. It was quite odd. I also have a photographic memory, have been great with geometry and basic vector physics, am generally a very good speller, and can get quite squeamish if someone describes a gory scene because I imagine it almost to a tee. How 'bout them apples? Lol
What I'd love to know is if any of you have been totally blind your whole life and still have some element of synaesthesia. Now that would be interesting. When describing things to totally blind friends who have never seen, I tend to use synaesthesia and other associations to help them relate colors, concepts, etc. Like I might say purple is like the taste of grape juice, green is like felt, red is like velvet, yellow is like the warmth of the sun, gray is like the scent of wet pavement, blue is clean sheets, etc. IT seems to be a pretty effective method.
Edit: I also have tenitis, so when I'm in large crowds, I have trouble hearing. However, I am still extremely sensitive to excessive light and sound. If a room is very loud, my chances of seeing anything at all are nill because the sounds actually seem to place a dark or sometimes white-ish veil over things, depending on the lighting of the room I am in. Lol my mind is a trip, and I love it.
Also also, I have been known to guess what people look like and sometimes be spot on. This only worked when I had a lot of online friends, though. When I go totally blind, I'm sure it'll happen with people in RL as well.
And finally, you'll be glad to know, if I meet someone wearing a red shirt, that is forever how she or he appears in my mind--wearing a red shirt. I have also come to start imagining her or him in her or his default color even when she or he is right in front of me. I think this latter issue may be due in part to my synaesthesia, but also to the fact that I am steadily losing color perception now.
As I've said in another thread, I am totally blind from birth and have synesthesia with sound, in particular certain music. I do not see color, but instead sort of spectrograms. A piece in a minor key, for example, will tend to have a more round or curved shape since the distances between the notes in that scale are not all the same. A smaller change in pitch (distance) over the same length in time will likely force a line to curve or corner to be less pointed.
quite interesting indeed, never heard of the condition but pretty cool to learn about it.