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.
December 1, 2008 at 1:04 am |
My digits don’t have very strong colours, but they have highly distinct personalities, and are all sitting on a big, slightly wavy diagonal number line. In primary school, I became exceptionally good at doing arithmetic in my head, because I remembered my multiplication tables, etc. by the numbers’ “relationships” with each other.