synesthesia Q&A (part 1)

I recently tried an online test called The Synaesthesia Battery and thought it might be of interest to anyone wanting to know more about synaesthesia.

Bear in mind that there are lots of different types of synaesthesia, and within each type are many variations, so it’s very probable that a lot of what I say won’t be experienced by other grapheme-colour synaesthetes, and likewise there will be similarities too – I guess that’s the point of the questionnaire. These are my answers.

When did your synesthesia begin?

Always had it

Can you think of any experiences that could have shaped your synesthetic associations, like childhood colored letter blocks?

Yes it’s possible that alphabet and number charts were the cause of some associations but I can’t remember anything specific. There are some names where I think the colour stems back to the first person I knew of that name (e.g. benjamin is orange, and the first benjamin I knew had bright ginger hair, and John is grey and the first John I knew wore a grey shirt at school when everyone else wore white)

Do you experience synesthesia all the time, or only under certain conditions?

All the time

Is your synesthesia present when you close your eyes?

Yes

Does your synesthesia interfere with other activities?

No

Does your synesthesia ever distract you?

I get distracted by everything anyway, but my synaesthesia does not distract me in a way that I can’t control

Do you feel that paying attention to your synesthetic perception requires effort?

A little. If I am being asked about my synaesthesia I find it difficult to answer the questions because I feel bombarded and get mixed up, but in a normal relaxed environment I have no trouble paying attention to it

Can you ignore your synesthesia?

It’s always there, but only very noticeable when I stop on a word or think about something

Does your synesthesia help you to remember things (by association)?

Numbers up to about 20 are easier to remember, but I think the synaesthesia either does nothing for my memory or just confuses me. Sometimes if I am trying to remember a word I can only remember its colour and not the actual word which is completely useless

Are there any properties of your synesthetic perceptions that make it easy to tell that they are internal (in your head) rather than external (in the outside world)? For instance, is the synesthetic yellow color you may see with a certain number different in any way from a real yellow color?

The colours, although vivid, are in a way transparent at the same time. So if I go into Photoshop and pick the colour for Wednesday, it will never be exact because my Wednesday will be a transparent orange rather than the block of orange I have picked in Photoshop.

Learnt associations or present from day one?

I have read literature on synaesthesia that looks into whether the connections between words and colours/tastes/shapes are associations picked up from childhood and throughout life. No-one really knows, but I have read articles that say the associations are not picked up in this way.

I think they are.

For me, some words are vivid colours because of their connotations. For example, ‘holiday’ is yellow because it has happy, sunny connotations, but if ‘holiday’ was a word I’d never heard of it would be quite a dark colour because of the H and O being black.

The name Benjamin is orange, and thinking back to primary school I had a friend called Benjamin who had bright ginger hair. Is this the reason why that name is that colour? I don’t know but it’s possible.

When I think of all the people I met at uni, their names might be the colour of whatever they were wearing the first time I noticed them. This isn’t always the case but it has happened, and I didn’t even realise it until recently (and it’s one of the reasons why a name like John can be lots of different colours depending on which John, but I’ll talk about this another day).

Although I believe that connections are constantly being made and kept, it’s still not a conscious choice. I think that a synaesthete has an ‘ability’, or something different that causes the brain to hold on to the connections and then cause the person to have that colour experience at a later date when confronted with the word or name. This raises many more questions, of which I’ll have to explore in the future.