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.

white the anomaly

It’s just occurred to me that ‘white’ is the only basic, everyday colour with a colour that doesn’t match its name. E.g ‘red’ is red, there’s no changing that, but white is, well, mostly grey/black in my mind’s eye. How bizarre.

colour names and colour impressions

A few years ago I was watching a TV programme and I heard a reference to the colour ‘taupe’. I’d never heard of that colour, and because of my synaesthesia I instantly thought it was a brick red colour (the T being the most prominent). Because I hadn’t been taught the word or learnt a connection, taupe was just the colour I saw it rather than the colour it actually is.

Funnily enough, now I know the colour of taupe, I still see it as brick red.

But then I started thinking about other colours, colour names I’ve known all my life, and I’m hard pushed to find a basic colour word that doesn’t match up with its actual colour (e.g. orange will always be orange even though on an individual letter basis there are no orange letters within the name). So what does this mean? Have my learnt associations over-ridden my normal synaesthetic perceptions? I would have to say yes. And because the answer is yes, it means that there are instances in which learnt associations do produce different colour perceptions to what comes naturally to synaesthetes.

The area of learning unfamiliar new words is interesting to me because it’s always intriguing to see what colour a word is, and whether it relates to the meaning of the word or just the word or individual letters producing the colour perception. This is something I will be adressing at some point because it has implications for learning a new foreign language, with words that mean the same thing as in your own language but are spelt and sound very different. Do the new colour perceptions relate to the meaning or to the actual word? This is what I’ll be trying to find out.