Our collective synesthesia, in graphs
aella.substack.com
aella.substack.com
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.
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
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?
The strongly synesthetic associations are 1) always-on*, 2) automatic and immediate, even for novel stimuli**, and 3) consistent over time***
* You can turn your focus away from them, like focusing on a person's voice in a noisy room, but you're still aware of the noise.
** You won't experience the smell of grass looking at a photo of a field, if you've never been to a field before. But many synesthetic associations occur immediately even for new stimuli, especially if it's a simple input like sound. If it's a complex concept like someone's personality or an algorithm, they are initially in flux and solidify as understanding of the concept improves.
*** They can change very slowly over time (years)
The above is more of a personal definition from my experience, and not a clinically accepted one.
Funnily enough, I do a fair bit of scoring picture and games, and I find that the scene informs what kind of music I'll make. It's not painting-by-numbers though, but it's like sharing synaesthesia in a tangible form.
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.
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.
And orange here is more like butterscotch the flavor than it is the color. Gah, no wonder I trained myself out of it.
I envy those who have a 1-to-1 mapping of sensation to concept. For me it is just a big ol' inchoate mélange.
Do you enjoy it?
I also see sound, and it constitutes roughly half of the stimulus I receive from music. Though it can be a bit annoying in noisy places when it can get distracting.
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
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.
I explicitly remember looking at the colored letters of the alphabet in my first grade classroom that kind of wrapped around the top of the room and thinking some of them were wrong. There was another set of colored letters in kindergarten near the chalk board that I can’t remember explicitly, but I think it was “right”, or at least more right.
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.