Sideshow Brain

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Birth of the Bab (Baha'i)
Miss American Rose Day
National Mammography Day
Birthday - Bela Lugosi (actor)
Birthday - Mickey Mantle (baseball)
Revolution Day (Guatemala)

 

So it would seem that I am not very clear on the way my colored words work. I think it’s because I said I wanted to know ‘what color’ a name was. This is not entirely accurate. What I actually am looking for is a color scheme, because each letter has its own hue. Asking me “What color is my name?” is like asking “What color is a tortoiseshell cat?” or “What color is a rainbow?”

 It’s also hard to describe because a lot of letters have abstract textures, highlights, or even weirder things like genders or personalities. There’s a world of connotation associated with the letter ‘M,’ for example—white, spongy, female, no-nonsense. So when you put a crowd of letters together, you get an interesting dynamic.

 

But this complicates things when you want to know what color your name is, because I can’t explain it completely, and that’s frustrating.* I can give you a ballpark, but to tell you exactly what’s in my head would require a projector I could hook up to my thoughts and a few extra dimensions. I’m afraid you’d have to be in here, because otherwise I can’t explain it.

 

(I can, however, do math with colors, because I see numbers the same way I do letters. You can ask me what green plus blue is, and I’ll answer immediately: “Brown!”  Or “Five!” if you want the number. (Some researchers scanned synesthetes’ brains while they asked them these questions, and found that the same areas that do math calculations work just as fast when asked something like that.) Granted, this never shows up on math tests, but it can come in handy just to help me figure out the math.** I suppose that gives me points for something.)

 

 

*Not as frustrating as trying to explain where, say, Wednesday is in my head, but still pretty frustrating.

 

**Richard Feynman supposedly saw lots of mathematical symbols in color, which gave all the equations he worked with interesting new dimensions.

Comments

[die-monster.livejournal.com]

I imagine that would be frustrating, yes. I have a very sensitive olfactory ability (as well as being a synaesthete, sort of? or maybe just weird). The sense of smell, however, is unique in that olfactory stimuli trigger right to the cortex without being wired through the thalamus (or some such), which is why smells are able to trigger such strong and complex memories in ways that sounds and sights are not. It also makes describing smells damned hard. Impossible, really. And people ask me to, all the time. And then I end up saying, "Oh, well, that smells blue, or like concentric circles, kind of." Because there is just no way to explain smells. Argh. Yes, frustrating.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

"Oh, I don't know. I'd say it has kind of a snorky, brambish smell." ;)

[die-monster.livejournal.com]

*laughs*

In addition to the fact that I pay a lot of attention to smells, and that they have weird, pseudo-synaesthetic associations with me, it just feels so strange to -try- and describe them. It's like those times that all of a sudden you realise you have a tongue, and you're just like "Oh. I have a tongue. Y'know, that's really bizarre" and it feels odd because you're thinking about something that has absolutely NO BUSINESS being thought about in a thinky way. It's hard to think about things that don't go to the thinky part first, y'know?

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

There's one scent I get a whiff of occasionally that I think of as being "green" (despite not smelling like cut grass or vegetation or anything else anyone would normally think of as green). It actually more of an astringent feel in the nose. I think of it as a nearly fluorescent green, very artificial and chemical.

[bluetara2020.livejournal.com]

Understandable. I mean, I have a hard time trying to explain the pictures in my head. Until I just break down and describe it as..."well, it's what honor would be like if you gave it form and color and taste and..."

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and there's a lot of, "Isn't it OBVIOUS?!", because it is to YOU. :)

[bluetara2020.livejournal.com]

And eee! I just noticed the new iconage. ^_^ rock on.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I considered being embarrassed that I liked it so much, but that seemed teenage itself, so I just went with it. TEA, for gods' sakes!

[ayn.livejournal.com]

That is extremely interesting. Have you been this way your entire life?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yes. One theory says that everyone starts out a synesthete, but most people those synapses that link perceptions get deleted. Some people have really whacky perceptions ~ I see time in color and 3-D, and some sound that way. Other people have more outlandish links, like taste and geometric shape.

If you're interested, a badly written but informative book on synesthesia is Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds by Pat Duffy. It's very thorough.

[nixve.livejournal.com]

ooh! I see numbers as having genders!

[viizou.livejournal.com]

You just push relativism to a whole new level, don't you? ;-)