COLORS EVERYWHERE

[bloodyrosemccoy]

You guys.

THIS. THIS IS MY LIFE.

For one thing, ugly voices are why I can't listen to Led Zeppelin (although fortunately for my longstanding crush on her, Madeline Kahn's voice is a nice light peach to me). For another, yes, I HAVE had that problem with folders. At Dad's office the patients charts were color-coded by the letter of their last name, and it goes without saying EVERY. SINGLE. LETTER. was the wrong color. I actually did screw it up from time to time.*

For a third thing, their #1 on the list made me laugh WAY too hard. You people and your grey,** lifeless world. I'm so sorry.

So, yeah, synesthesia is pretty crazy. And these guys don't even get into the ordinal linguistic personification. That stuff is WHACK, man. I sometimes wonder if linguistic gender stemmed from the fact that some damn synesthete somewhere just fuckin' KNEW their table was a girl and their oven was a dude. Yet another mystery for the scientists to mess with.


*Though for some reason "S" and "W" gave me the most trouble. They were the ones I got wrong most often. And I mixed up "G" and "H" a lot for some reason, because one folder was pink and the other was lilac when IN ACTUALITY both of them are different shades of impossible orange. I guess their similarity in my head made it hard to convert the RIGHT shade of impossible orange.

**Fun Fact I spell it "grey" not because I am pompous (well, that, too) but because the letter A is bright candy pink and E is a sort of sage-green-grey, and therefore E is more suited for the word.

Comments

[bienenwolf.livejournal.com]

I always enjoy hearing your synesthesia stories! I do kinda feel like I'm missing out a little bit on the brightly coloured brain weirdness now...

(I just get the strong associations numbers with personalities/sensations weirdness. I'm still so glad it's not 2011 anymore. Ew.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

2011 isn't a nice number, then?

[bienenwolf.livejournal.com]

2011 has a weird, porridge-y puke-y kind of quality. That's the best way I can explain it. :P (11 by itself is ok by me though. just kinda bland.)

[redbird]

Very early in the history of the Web, there was a page at the WWW consortium called "why the W's are green." W3C used a particular shade of green for everywhere they had "WWW," because that was the right color for the synaesthete who worked there.

[cjtremlett.livejournal.com]

You're the only synesthete that I know, or the only one who talks about it regularly and I think it's really cool!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I think it's kinda cool, too. I love finding out more about what brains do.

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

This is the reason I can't watch Maroon 5 perform. Adam Levine's face and Adam Levine's voice do not have the same personality or feel or anything in common and watching him sing (even just imagining him singing the songs of the radio) just fills me with utter disgust. However, I enjoy the songs on their own, and I have no problem with watching interviews with him.
Just not the singing and the face together.

But yes, totally agree with their #1. Especially on the music thing. I'm very strongly sound -> visual/feeling and classical music is like the best thing in the world ever for that type of synaesthesia. Add that to their #2 point about memory superpowers, I think my synaesthesia reaction to music allows me to memorize whatever music I'm playing a lot more easily than I would otherwise. It's like watching a movie, I just have to remember what order the scenes go in.

BTW, A is totally red, and E is one of those dreaded impossible blue-yellow colors.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my memory is a lot better for things when I can associate colors with them. I noticed my Japanese improved when the hiragana, katakana, and kanji graphemes started to take on their own colors. And I do math better, too!

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

heh math still eludes me. I think part of the reason is because I don't have very strong synaesthetic associations for numbers (except even numbers are 'good' and odds are 'bad' except for 7 and 11, which are 'good').

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Marissa Moss's Amelia's Notebook includes a bit where the titular protagonist confesses that she can't do math because the numbers are too busy having personality clashes. I asked Moss later about synesthesia. "Doesn't everyone see things that way?" she asked. Ah, synesthetic self-discovery.

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had no idea Cracked had legitimate information on it! Will wonders never cease.

I'm glad to know that impossible colors really exist. There are colors in my head that no amount of pigment mixing will match and I figured I was just doing it wrong. A pigment of the imagination, as it were.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Cracked has TONS of legitimate information on it--they're silly, but they actually do some impressive journalism. Especially now that they've started the "personal experience" thing where they help other people with interesting lives write about it.

I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE. And god, yes, those frustrating impossible colors. They gave me no end of trouble as a kid.

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

The closest I've come to some of those colors are the duo-toned silk dupioni. Sometimes the light will hit the two crossing colors just right and there it is- for about a half a second.

Good to know that now when I'm screwing off looking at Cracked I can say "IT'S RESEARCH"

[broken-moons.livejournal.com]

OMG, you're right - du0-toned silk dupioni really is the closest thing to some of my impossible colours. But yes, only for like a second depending on how the light falls^.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

I think of red for A, but that's because I had "A is for apple" drummed into me as a kid. I can't quite suppose that's the reason for everyone else.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It's possible. I'm used to those ABC posters hanging in kindergarten classrooms having A in red (which is WRONG, god dammit), so I expect you aren't the only one.

[spiffikins]

I kind of feel like I'm missing out on something really cool!

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

I cross-associate sound with mouthfeel and motion, though I'm not sure it's synaesthesia as such. No idea if it's consistent or pervasive enough. (Bass flute is the texture of biting into soft dark chocolate; some singers with particularly nasal voices are the texture of running your teeth or tongue across the ridged plastic surface of a lenticular picture, and as such are almost always unpleasant to listen to; the word "bottle" is a small clockwise vertical spiral motion with a short tail.)

I'd love to be able to "see" the visuals with music, but I don't really feel I'm missing out, either; it's its own sensation.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I think your sensations probably count! And I remember you mentioning that about "bottle," since I noted that for me is onomatopoeic.

[linda-lupos.livejournal.com]

Ha, see! See! I knew my synesthesia helped me remember stuff! Especially phone numbers and dates. I remember the order of the colour, not the order of the numbers themselves, so when I have to write it down I go "no, wait, those colours look wrong, so the number is wrong". Same with time tables - in high school, I'd memorized the time tables of my friends as well (we were in different classes) and I didn't really get why they couldn't remember six different time tables at the same time. Wasn't that easy?

A is a lovely autumny brownish red by the way, and E is a greenish blue. My name, Linda, is a lovely warm golden yellow, edging towards a brownish sort of caramel colour. On the other hand, my friend Linda's name is a greenish yellow - probably to do with the fact that my last name begins with a brown H and her last name begins with the greenish M! Does that sound familiar to anyone else?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I don't know how much last names influence first names or vice versa for me, but I've heard of it with others.

I was always good at spelling because of the colors. Only thing that tripped me up was double letters, because they were the same color. Is it "tomorrow," "tommorow," or "tommorrow"?

[broken-moons.livejournal.com]

Oh my spork, I'm going to save that article somewhere when I get home, because they're nailing it on all the points. And yes, classical music is a delight for my synesthetic ears, too :D

I prefer 'grey' to 'gray' as well, because I'm firmly in the school of 'a is red' and e is a green/blue colour. Personal anecdote: during my translator training I found myself struggling to explain why I was so adamant about translating 'de jongen met het mes' as the 'boy with the knife' even when everyone said that 'guy' fit the description better: 'the guy with the knife' made me feel like I was drowning in a sea of orange and yellow, and I had to throw in the blue of 'boy' to try and balance some of it. I still lost that argument though :(

Also, my synestesia disguises itself as letter>colour but I suspect it's more like sound>colour because only the vowels have colour (consonants only give lightness or darkness to a word), and they correspond to the pronunciations I learned as a kid in Dutch, not the English alfabet. So 'e' looks green/blue, and sounds green/blue in Dutch, but in English it sounds like 'i' which is yellow.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that different languages slightly alter the colors of letters--it's rather like the language is a form of lighting. I'd be curious to hear more about how it differs with you!

[broken-moons.livejournal.com]

Ooh, bilingual synesthesia is fun, I can tell you. :)

I actually discovered my synesthesia pretty late - my first introduction was at age 13 from my music teacher, but he only presented it as being able to see musical keys as colours. While music was a mess of colour and shapes and movement for me, it had no bearing on the key, so my thoughts were partly 'that sounds like me!' and partly 'oh no wait it doesn't never mind'. Only years later did I find out about all the other kinds of synesthesia (I think partly through you, actually), and the penny dropped. Even then I thought I was just making it up sometimes because I could not settle on what things looked like or sounded like, until I realised I had to factor in the bilingual thing ^__^

For me it's less like different lighting and more like layers - like those holographic images that change slightly if you tilt it this way or that way. My synesthesia is mostly sound-based but also letter/number-based, though the way numbers look is different from how they sound, and of course Dutch numbers sound different than English numbers.

For instance, 2 looks white, no doubt about it, but 'twee' sounds and looks green/blue (it's almost turquoise but not quite, so the impossible colours from that article definitely make sense to me), and 'two' looks royal blue but sounds like a dark shade of blue/green (because the 'ooh' sound in English is written 'oe' in Dutch). And 6 is pink, but 'zes' is light blue, and 'six' is pale yellow, kind of sparkly when spoken aloud.

With all this, though, I'm glad I'm an associator rather than a projector, because I'd probably go mad if I saw all of this superimposed on whatever I was looking at, instead of my head just 'knowing' what it looks like without actually seeing it.

[kittikattie.livejournal.com]

Cracked is hitting all the good shit when they write now.

I realize I am late to the party, but

[piccolo-pirate.livejournal.com]

THAT IS ALSO WHY I SPELL GREY WITH AN E. Except I see A as yellow, and e DOES make a nice sage-green-grey, whereas the yellow makes it sort of sulfurous and bleck.

RE: I realize I am late to the party, but

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, we may have wildly differing A's, BUT AT LEAST WE CAN ALL AGREE that "grey" makes WAY more sense than "gray."

[marsdejahthoris.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I get it more with numbers than with letters, and with sounds. Digits especially, which make phone numbers a snap. Except that 8 is a chameleon, and changes color depending on the other numbers around it. One of our guys has a phone number that's all reds and oranges and brown, with a spot of yellow and black, and I always think of it as the "lava phone number."