synaesthesia and learning

I have been wondering for a while whether I can use synaesthesia to help with my memory but so far it’s still just confusing me. E.g. Recently I had to remember the number 770074 (I think that’s the number anyway!) but I’ve been having trouble with it because zero is transparent, and for some reason the dark blue 4 drops off the end into an abyss, so that when I try and remember the number, all I can see clearly is the two green 7s at the beginning and then the other seven faintly with darkness at the end. What I see is this:

But I had an email today from the synesthesia mailing list again and the message that caught my eye was from someone who has learnt to use their synaesthesia to their own benefit. This person was struggling with maths so started to concentrate on the synaesthesia while carrying out equations. She found out that by noticing the syn more she was able to see not only the colour of the numbers, but also the colours of the square roots etc around the number too, so by thinking about the number, the colours that appeared in association with that number provided the answers to other things.

I can only hope I can figure out a method like this for remembering things.

people as colours (revisited)

In a previous post I discussed the fact that individual people are also colours to me, and it was different from just the colour of the letters in their name because two people with the same name can be completely different colours.

In a bid to find out why, I posted a message to a synaesthesia mailing list and waited for replies.

It turns out I’m not alone in this. A few people took the time to reply and let me know that they also get confused and forget names because the colours of the people don’t match the colour of their name.

The problem is, no-one seems to know what’s causing the colour response.

Is it a physical feature of the person (eye colour, hair colour?)

Is it their personality evoking the colour response?

Is it our own feelings and emotions that we experience when thinking of the person or being around them?

The more I think about it the more I get confused. For instance, I had a phonecall at work today and the woman was distinctly black on the phone. She told me her name was Karen, which has elements of black and yellow in it, but I don’t know if it was her name or her phone manner/personality that caused me to see black. What I was actually seeing was a fuzzy black I usually see with ‘zoe’ or ‘zara’. I have no idea why.

That’s the great thing about synaesthesia though. It’s just as much a mystery to those who have it as to those who don’t.