I don't have synesthesia but thanks to Color Graphics Adapter (CGA), GW-BASIC, QBASIC, etc. that I encountered in the 1990s, 1 is forever going to be blue to me, and similarly, 2 is green, 3 is cyan, 4 is red, and so on.
As a result of this childhood bias for certain integers representing certain colours, it is a bit disconcerting to me that ANSI colour escape sequences use the least significant bit to represent red rather than blue, i.e., in ANSI colours, 1 is red, 2 is green, 3 is yellow, 4 is blue, and so on.
Synesthesia isn't about associating numbers, musical notes or other things with COLORS. It's associating any one collection of things of the the same type (say, days of the week) with pretty much any random set of objects, forms, colors, shapes or whatnot. I read the article and then all the comments here and it appears to me that most people are collectively blind to the fact that it isn't just about colors [1][2].
UPDATE. A thought I'd just had: it appears very intuitive that most people do have synesthesia, they're just not consciously aware of it, or, sometimes, don't even know what to call it.
> UPDATE. A thought I'd just had: it appears very intuitive that most people do have synesthesia, they're just not consciously aware of it, or, sometimes, don't even know what to call it.
The Wikipedia article is vague, but I've always thought of synesthesia as meaning that a stimulus in one "category" provokes a response in another "category"—Wikipedia and your post seem to say the same thing, but with different, and more technical, terminology in place of "category". More to the point, there seems to be some implication that this is a response that "shouldn't" happen; that there is an appropriate response to the stimulus, and that the actual response isn't the appropriate one.
But it seems that, if, as you suppose, most people have synesthesia, then the problem is one of definitions. If most people have an inappropriate response, then doesn't that mean that the definition of 'appropriate' is wrong—it's meaningless to say that everyone is abnormal!—so that mass-scale synesthesia must, if it exists, indicate nothing unusual per se about synesthetes, but rather a poor mapping on the part of diagnosticians?
This is correct, I see visuals when I hear sounds. The textures and shapes correspond to the type of sound. For instance, a clean guitar has a different texture than a distorted guitar. Same for people's voices.
A more interesting version of this experiment would be to also ask people who don't claim to have synesthesia to associate a color with each month/number/whatever and see what, if any, correlation there is with the synesthesia folk.
In the case of months, I wouldn't be surprised if orange is also picked for October (esp. if you're in North America - pumpkins, Halloween) and white and blue picked for December (esp. if you are in the northern hemisphere or if you are exposed to Christmas).
Blue is clearly "even" and yellow is definitely "odd". I will grant some lee-way with the rest.
Kidding aside, I had undiagnosed synesthesia pretty bad when I was a kid, but I learnt to ignore it as I grew. Now I am aware of "solidness" associated with "Wednesday", or "blue" with 8, or "sharpness" with "yellow", but these are not intrusive or confusing. For me, they aren't a 1 to 1 mapping. 3 is yellow but it's also orange and so is 7. Dunno.
So do you experience both yellow and orange simultaneously when you see 3? Are they juxtaposed, mixed together, or in completely separate visual spaces?
I do experience multiple colors for certain things, but they are either in the form of a texture/gradient or dependent upon context. For instance, a "C" in a chemical formula is different from in a word.
I do have synesthesia, and this is quite interesting to see. One thing to note is that (at least for me) the colors are very specific. It isn't just "red", it's a specific shade of red that I can pick from a color picker with relatively little error. Sometimes there are gradients involved. So looking at the graphs, none of them actually jump out to me as the "correct" color.
Same, mostly. This charting didn’t really work for me. But I often have a hard time picking the exact right color, too.
Many of the lower digits for me are shades of red, but are kind of comparative.
2 is red.
9 is a dark red.
5 is a lighter red in comparison to 9.
A lot of the higher numbers just kind of turn to black/I separate by digits. And all of the digits can still be black, the colors I associate just kind of get overlayed.
Some, like 6, are kind of confusing. It’s dark purple, but most shades of purple don’t feel right.
Some, like 1, is black or blue. Its definitely black when a digit of a higher number. It’s blue when I think of ordinals/first place.
3 is definitely yellow as a digit, pretty much always, but it gets dirtier sometimes. It can also be red/redish.
4 is like a dark aqua blue I associate heavily with water, but it can also be green, like when I think of the letter D, which I associate because they have the same order.
Would be interested to hear if you also have any associations that are “fuzzy” or context dependent like this. My associations in a given context are very very consistent/have had these same associations as long as I can remember, and I imagine the digits being colored in the way I described, but I’m also not sure if whatever I’m doing is really the same thing as people who actually experience the color quite vividly and automatically. I found a cool article a while back that talked about different subtypes, but I can’t remember if I’ve run across others describing this “fuzziness” aspect. It’s made me doubt whether I really have it, although it seems pretty definite that I do given the consistency with other explanations, but it also seems like it might be more kind of like a labelling/categorization thing for me than like a forced experience thing I hear some other people describe.
I am sure I experience synesthesia as I have associated shapes and images in my head associated with numbers, letters, words, basically anything that relates to language. These associations mostly appear to be things I experienced at the same time learning a word or an early association. Some are almost geometric colorful shapes, not solid colored but a rainbow gradient, and may move or be animated like a bursting color orb. Some are motion oriented and I cant describe them. It's almost as if the word is invisibly dancing in my mind with a shape I cannot see.
A silly example I have is the word shit. When I was a child curse words were not spoken at home but at my fathers shop were regular experiences. I was maybe 3 or 4 when an employee of my fathers was using some kind of wooden square frame with a lever on top and spring. It was some kind of press to stamp logos or something. I was playing on a portable staircase nearby when he squeezed the lever and then yelled "SHIT!". So now when I hear shit I see a vague image of this mans face and/or a square frame with a lever being pushed. If I think about the word I see my fathers early shop and remember that portable staircase.
The word fuck has a very odd animation in my head. I see what is a squarish human skull being held by the jaw and flipped upward 90 degrees by flicking the wrist holding it.
This is exactly my thought as well. To me, the days of the week and month names are colored as well, but I wonder if we just used colored signs and posters to learn them in kindergarten
I definitely don’t have synesthesia, but these are also the answers I would give for most of these (of course zero is neutral, Monday is red, December is white, and the summer months are warmer colours)
Perhaps I’m looking into the data too much, but it doesn’t surprise me that 0 is often the neutral white, black or grey, and that, because we use the base 10 number system, the pattern is the same for 10. These colours and numbers are both “clean”. It’s the same for 2: the most popular colours are blue, yellow, red then green, and that pattern is repeated for 20. Of course, this “pattern” is already broken since it should be 1 with the same pattern as 10 and 2 wirh the same pattern as 20. It would be interesting to see if patterns do indeed emerge with more data. I would certainly expect 100, 1000, 1,000,000 to often be white, black or grey.
For myself, I’ve always associated colours with days of the week. I don’t know if others have this, but it’s always felt more “obvious” what colours some days of the week are compared to others, like the feeling is stronger or the colour is more brilliantly defined. But I do wonder to what extent it may have just been me as a child tricking myself into thinking I’m special, and I’ve just forever embedded those colour memories, because it’s really not like if someone tells me “Wednesday” I automatically experience a powerful crimson red; I have to kind of ask myself: “what colour is Wednesday?” to experience it in my mind’s eye.
Interesting data, but I think a lot more could be done with presentation. Something that puts the data in comparison by itself visualizes it better as a whole.
Red Green color blind here. Happy to report I have no associations between numbers and colors that I'm aware of. I could see numbers having sounds or shapes though.
[+] [-] susam|3 years ago|reply
As a result of this childhood bias for certain integers representing certain colours, it is a bit disconcerting to me that ANSI colour escape sequences use the least significant bit to represent red rather than blue, i.e., in ANSI colours, 1 is red, 2 is green, 3 is yellow, 4 is blue, and so on.
[+] [-] smoochy|3 years ago|reply
UPDATE. A thought I'd just had: it appears very intuitive that most people do have synesthesia, they're just not consciously aware of it, or, sometimes, don't even know what to call it.
[1] Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
[2] Cynically explained by Rustin Cohle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaYiq9x7odE
[+] [-] JadeNB|3 years ago|reply
The Wikipedia article is vague, but I've always thought of synesthesia as meaning that a stimulus in one "category" provokes a response in another "category"—Wikipedia and your post seem to say the same thing, but with different, and more technical, terminology in place of "category". More to the point, there seems to be some implication that this is a response that "shouldn't" happen; that there is an appropriate response to the stimulus, and that the actual response isn't the appropriate one.
But it seems that, if, as you suppose, most people have synesthesia, then the problem is one of definitions. If most people have an inappropriate response, then doesn't that mean that the definition of 'appropriate' is wrong—it's meaningless to say that everyone is abnormal!—so that mass-scale synesthesia must, if it exists, indicate nothing unusual per se about synesthetes, but rather a poor mapping on the part of diagnosticians?
[+] [-] vortexforgot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esperent|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andsoitis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rendall|3 years ago|reply
Kidding aside, I had undiagnosed synesthesia pretty bad when I was a kid, but I learnt to ignore it as I grew. Now I am aware of "solidness" associated with "Wednesday", or "blue" with 8, or "sharpness" with "yellow", but these are not intrusive or confusing. For me, they aren't a 1 to 1 mapping. 3 is yellow but it's also orange and so is 7. Dunno.
[+] [-] vortexforgot|3 years ago|reply
I do experience multiple colors for certain things, but they are either in the form of a texture/gradient or dependent upon context. For instance, a "C" in a chemical formula is different from in a word.
[+] [-] vortexforgot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] didericis|3 years ago|reply
Many of the lower digits for me are shades of red, but are kind of comparative.
2 is red. 9 is a dark red. 5 is a lighter red in comparison to 9.
A lot of the higher numbers just kind of turn to black/I separate by digits. And all of the digits can still be black, the colors I associate just kind of get overlayed.
Some, like 6, are kind of confusing. It’s dark purple, but most shades of purple don’t feel right.
Some, like 1, is black or blue. Its definitely black when a digit of a higher number. It’s blue when I think of ordinals/first place.
3 is definitely yellow as a digit, pretty much always, but it gets dirtier sometimes. It can also be red/redish.
4 is like a dark aqua blue I associate heavily with water, but it can also be green, like when I think of the letter D, which I associate because they have the same order.
Would be interested to hear if you also have any associations that are “fuzzy” or context dependent like this. My associations in a given context are very very consistent/have had these same associations as long as I can remember, and I imagine the digits being colored in the way I described, but I’m also not sure if whatever I’m doing is really the same thing as people who actually experience the color quite vividly and automatically. I found a cool article a while back that talked about different subtypes, but I can’t remember if I’ve run across others describing this “fuzziness” aspect. It’s made me doubt whether I really have it, although it seems pretty definite that I do given the consistency with other explanations, but it also seems like it might be more kind of like a labelling/categorization thing for me than like a forced experience thing I hear some other people describe.
EDIT: missed that rendall describes something that sounds the same as the “fuzziness” thing I’m trying to articulate here -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32675007
[+] [-] MisterTea|3 years ago|reply
A silly example I have is the word shit. When I was a child curse words were not spoken at home but at my fathers shop were regular experiences. I was maybe 3 or 4 when an employee of my fathers was using some kind of wooden square frame with a lever on top and spring. It was some kind of press to stamp logos or something. I was playing on a portable staircase nearby when he squeezed the lever and then yelled "SHIT!". So now when I hear shit I see a vague image of this mans face and/or a square frame with a lever being pushed. If I think about the word I see my fathers early shop and remember that portable staircase.
The word fuck has a very odd animation in my head. I see what is a squarish human skull being held by the jaw and flipped upward 90 degrees by flicking the wrist holding it.
[+] [-] 7373737373|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PcChip|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Edd314159|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Moodles|3 years ago|reply
For myself, I’ve always associated colours with days of the week. I don’t know if others have this, but it’s always felt more “obvious” what colours some days of the week are compared to others, like the feeling is stronger or the colour is more brilliantly defined. But I do wonder to what extent it may have just been me as a child tricking myself into thinking I’m special, and I’ve just forever embedded those colour memories, because it’s really not like if someone tells me “Wednesday” I automatically experience a powerful crimson red; I have to kind of ask myself: “what colour is Wednesday?” to experience it in my mind’s eye.
[+] [-] kzrdude|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] adamgordonbell|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tigerlily|3 years ago|reply