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

[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.