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Sep. 30th, 2009 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
majutsukaiSo, I had a brief conversation on this subject the other day over Twitter, but Twitter's text limits are so draconian that I couldn't really go into detail on the subject. So I'm gonna talk about it on here! :D
In the latest Heroes episode, the subject of Synaesthesia came up. Having Synaesthesia myself, I wanted to take a moment to talk about my experiences with it.
The word "Synaesthetic" can be broken down to the greek roots "syn", meaning "together", and "aesthetic", meaning "of the senses"-- basically, it literally means a melding of the senses. (As a side-note, it's more commonly spelled "synesthesia" if you want to google it, but I prefer the spelling with the "a" because of the "aesthetic" root.)
Synaesthesia is a phenomenon in the brain where multiple senses or abstract perceptions work in tandem, perceiving the same thing in multiple ways.
If you've heard of hallucinogenic experiences where the senses get crossed-- the person can "see sounds" or "taste colors" or things like that... synaesthesia is a little like that for some people. Just not exactly. I'll explain in a moment.
The woman in the Heroes episode was deaf, but had the ability to literally see sounds. She would see the shattering of a coffee mug as a burst of light, and the playing of a violin as a stream of colors.
This is very clearly inspired by a real type of synaesthesia-- sound-color synaesthesia. However, the way it's portrayed in the show, it is definitely a superpower under the Heroes-verse's definition of the term. The Heroes wiki is currently having a discussion about naming the particular power "Enhanced Synesthesia", due to its clear but incomplete resemblance to synaesthetic experiences.
So where do I come into this? Well, the form of synaesthesia I have is, by and large, the most common form-- Grapheme-Color synaesthesia, which is the perception of letters and numbers (graphemes) as being inherently colored.
Now, this doesn't mean that they look colored to me. There are some people who actually see these color associations with their eyes, as if letters and numbers are literally colored-- this type of synaesthesia is called "projected", and only about 2% of the already thin cross-section of synaesthetes have this type. I have the much more common type, which is more of a conceptual link between the symbol and the color. I would describe it as more "seeing the colors with your mind, not with your eyes". It's a very difficult thing to describe to someone who doesn't have this sort of experience, a bit like describing sight to someone who's never been able to see.
There have been studies suggesting that most, if not all humans have a certain level of synaesthetic experience. If you want to know how I know that A is red, it's the same way that you know what shape has what name in that article.
The woman on the show would find her powers useful because they give her an extra sense-- she can hear without hearing. Real synaesthesia is more useful as a memory aid. It's like a mnemonic device that's already hard-coded into your brain. But besides that, it's interesting in its own right.
These are experiences I've had since I was a child. I would never have been able to properly put them into words back then, and in fact I didn't even realize that it was unusual. This is apparently a common experience among synaesthetes.
But Matt! What color is everything.
I guess I might as well get to that part.
0 is white.
1 I've never been sure about.
2 is yellow.
3 is green.
4 is blue.
5 is orange.
6 is pink.
7 is green.
8 is rust brown.
9 is magenta.
A is red (this is the single most common synaesthetic color association, according to wikipedia).
B is blue.
C is green.
D is blue.
etc. ad infinitum.
The associations are highly individual, and two synaesthetes will almost never completely agree on what symbol is what color. There are, however, common threads, like the A Is Red example. I have my own ideas about why this may be the case, but let's not get too off-track here.
This has even carried over into my knowledge of Japanese. Since I learned it much more recently than I learned english, the associations aren't as strong, but they're definitely there. There's usually rhyme and reason to it-- for instance, I see the letter K as being green, and similarly, か, き, く, け, and こ are all different shades of green. Similarly, I was never able to pin down one specific color for the letter N, and な, に, ぬ, ね, and の are likewise ambiguously colored. (though I'd say they're all a bit more yellow than the letter N.) This got in my way a bit when I was first learning hiragana, since ぬ and ね already looked a bit similar, and I didn't have colors to distinguish them-- leading me to mix them up a few times. Similarly, W doesn't have a definite color for me, leading me to sometimes screw up ワ and ヲ, but never ワ and フ, despite the fact that they look more similar than the former pair.
I also have some other, slightly more unique synaesthetic experiences. For example, not only do I see individual letters as being colored, but I also see whole words as having their own colors. Typically, a word will take on the color of its first letter; for instance, my own name is red, while my mother's, Linda, is green.
Sometimes, though, the word is a different color from its component letters. This is most commonly the case with color words, which are always the same color as the color they describe. Blue and Green already start with letters that are the same color (B is blue and G is green), but Red is a red word, but has no red letters. Azure is also a blue word, just as Emerald is a green word and Ruby is a red word. It generally doesn't matter how esoteric the word is; if it describes a color, then it is that color. Unless it's so esoteric that I don't know it.
Sapphire, however, is a yellow word. This is probably because I heard the word "Sapphire" before I ever knew what a sapphire looked like, so it took on the color of its first letter. In retrospect, this is probably why, when I was younger, I originally assumed sapphires were yellow before I had ever seen one, though I couldn't have told you why at the time. This is probably the sole example of my synaesthesia working against me.
There are a few examples of words that have colors having nothing to do with their component letters or meanings. For instance, "Tuesday" is yellow, "Wednesday" is blue, and "Thursday" is green, but they don't start with letters of those colors. The other days of the week have colors corresponding to their initial letters (except for Saturday, whose color I'm not sure about.) Additionally, months have their own color associations-- December is a light, sort of periwinkle blue, while January is more of a pink or a magenta, November is yellow, and August is burnt umber.
But guess what. I have an even weirder kind of synaesthesia, which I haven't found a name for in any of the wikimaterial, but apparently some people other than myself do in fact experience.
Some letters and numbers... are gendered.
6 and 9 are female, for instance, while 4, 5, and 8 are male.
I don't know. It's just always been that way for me. It can't be a coincidence that the two female numbers are also the two that have the more stereotypically feminine colors, also.
I actually found a synaesthesia message board where some people referred to numbers with gendered pronouns-- but I don't take it that far. That's just weird. But it proves that this is definitely a real type of synaesthesia. It's like a weak version of Ordinal-Linguistic Personification.
According to the wikipedia article, synaesthesia is being tentatively linked with left-right confusion and difficulty with sense of direction. I know that I definitely have these two problems-- I still have to use the "hand test" to tell left from right sometimes-- so maybe that's where that came from.
I could even have more types of synaesthesia that I'm not even aware of-- I know that a few of the types I've described already were working on a purely sub-conscious level before I started thinking about them. But for now, that's all I can really say about my own experiences.
If any of this is confusing to you, then I highly recommend that you read the wiki articles I've linked, which actually describe it fairly well, in my opinion. If you're still confused, feel free to ask me anything. :D
In the latest Heroes episode, the subject of Synaesthesia came up. Having Synaesthesia myself, I wanted to take a moment to talk about my experiences with it.
The word "Synaesthetic" can be broken down to the greek roots "syn", meaning "together", and "aesthetic", meaning "of the senses"-- basically, it literally means a melding of the senses. (As a side-note, it's more commonly spelled "synesthesia" if you want to google it, but I prefer the spelling with the "a" because of the "aesthetic" root.)
Synaesthesia is a phenomenon in the brain where multiple senses or abstract perceptions work in tandem, perceiving the same thing in multiple ways.
If you've heard of hallucinogenic experiences where the senses get crossed-- the person can "see sounds" or "taste colors" or things like that... synaesthesia is a little like that for some people. Just not exactly. I'll explain in a moment.
The woman in the Heroes episode was deaf, but had the ability to literally see sounds. She would see the shattering of a coffee mug as a burst of light, and the playing of a violin as a stream of colors.
This is very clearly inspired by a real type of synaesthesia-- sound-color synaesthesia. However, the way it's portrayed in the show, it is definitely a superpower under the Heroes-verse's definition of the term. The Heroes wiki is currently having a discussion about naming the particular power "Enhanced Synesthesia", due to its clear but incomplete resemblance to synaesthetic experiences.
So where do I come into this? Well, the form of synaesthesia I have is, by and large, the most common form-- Grapheme-Color synaesthesia, which is the perception of letters and numbers (graphemes) as being inherently colored.
Now, this doesn't mean that they look colored to me. There are some people who actually see these color associations with their eyes, as if letters and numbers are literally colored-- this type of synaesthesia is called "projected", and only about 2% of the already thin cross-section of synaesthetes have this type. I have the much more common type, which is more of a conceptual link between the symbol and the color. I would describe it as more "seeing the colors with your mind, not with your eyes". It's a very difficult thing to describe to someone who doesn't have this sort of experience, a bit like describing sight to someone who's never been able to see.
There have been studies suggesting that most, if not all humans have a certain level of synaesthetic experience. If you want to know how I know that A is red, it's the same way that you know what shape has what name in that article.
The woman on the show would find her powers useful because they give her an extra sense-- she can hear without hearing. Real synaesthesia is more useful as a memory aid. It's like a mnemonic device that's already hard-coded into your brain. But besides that, it's interesting in its own right.
These are experiences I've had since I was a child. I would never have been able to properly put them into words back then, and in fact I didn't even realize that it was unusual. This is apparently a common experience among synaesthetes.
But Matt! What color is everything.
I guess I might as well get to that part.
0 is white.
1 I've never been sure about.
2 is yellow.
3 is green.
4 is blue.
5 is orange.
6 is pink.
7 is green.
8 is rust brown.
9 is magenta.
A is red (this is the single most common synaesthetic color association, according to wikipedia).
B is blue.
C is green.
D is blue.
etc. ad infinitum.
The associations are highly individual, and two synaesthetes will almost never completely agree on what symbol is what color. There are, however, common threads, like the A Is Red example. I have my own ideas about why this may be the case, but let's not get too off-track here.
This has even carried over into my knowledge of Japanese. Since I learned it much more recently than I learned english, the associations aren't as strong, but they're definitely there. There's usually rhyme and reason to it-- for instance, I see the letter K as being green, and similarly, か, き, く, け, and こ are all different shades of green. Similarly, I was never able to pin down one specific color for the letter N, and な, に, ぬ, ね, and の are likewise ambiguously colored. (though I'd say they're all a bit more yellow than the letter N.) This got in my way a bit when I was first learning hiragana, since ぬ and ね already looked a bit similar, and I didn't have colors to distinguish them-- leading me to mix them up a few times. Similarly, W doesn't have a definite color for me, leading me to sometimes screw up ワ and ヲ, but never ワ and フ, despite the fact that they look more similar than the former pair.
I also have some other, slightly more unique synaesthetic experiences. For example, not only do I see individual letters as being colored, but I also see whole words as having their own colors. Typically, a word will take on the color of its first letter; for instance, my own name is red, while my mother's, Linda, is green.
Sometimes, though, the word is a different color from its component letters. This is most commonly the case with color words, which are always the same color as the color they describe. Blue and Green already start with letters that are the same color (B is blue and G is green), but Red is a red word, but has no red letters. Azure is also a blue word, just as Emerald is a green word and Ruby is a red word. It generally doesn't matter how esoteric the word is; if it describes a color, then it is that color. Unless it's so esoteric that I don't know it.
Sapphire, however, is a yellow word. This is probably because I heard the word "Sapphire" before I ever knew what a sapphire looked like, so it took on the color of its first letter. In retrospect, this is probably why, when I was younger, I originally assumed sapphires were yellow before I had ever seen one, though I couldn't have told you why at the time. This is probably the sole example of my synaesthesia working against me.
There are a few examples of words that have colors having nothing to do with their component letters or meanings. For instance, "Tuesday" is yellow, "Wednesday" is blue, and "Thursday" is green, but they don't start with letters of those colors. The other days of the week have colors corresponding to their initial letters (except for Saturday, whose color I'm not sure about.) Additionally, months have their own color associations-- December is a light, sort of periwinkle blue, while January is more of a pink or a magenta, November is yellow, and August is burnt umber.
But guess what. I have an even weirder kind of synaesthesia, which I haven't found a name for in any of the wikimaterial, but apparently some people other than myself do in fact experience.
Some letters and numbers... are gendered.
6 and 9 are female, for instance, while 4, 5, and 8 are male.
I don't know. It's just always been that way for me. It can't be a coincidence that the two female numbers are also the two that have the more stereotypically feminine colors, also.
I actually found a synaesthesia message board where some people referred to numbers with gendered pronouns-- but I don't take it that far. That's just weird. But it proves that this is definitely a real type of synaesthesia. It's like a weak version of Ordinal-Linguistic Personification.
According to the wikipedia article, synaesthesia is being tentatively linked with left-right confusion and difficulty with sense of direction. I know that I definitely have these two problems-- I still have to use the "hand test" to tell left from right sometimes-- so maybe that's where that came from.
I could even have more types of synaesthesia that I'm not even aware of-- I know that a few of the types I've described already were working on a purely sub-conscious level before I started thinking about them. But for now, that's all I can really say about my own experiences.
If any of this is confusing to you, then I highly recommend that you read the wiki articles I've linked, which actually describe it fairly well, in my opinion. If you're still confused, feel free to ask me anything. :D
