Personality Colours

I find myself becoming increasingly disappointed when a singer or some such person in the public eye who I’ve heard about does not live up to the colour I saw for them. What I mean is, as I’ve mentioned before, people seem to have colours that are somtimes unrelated to just their name, so their name can have a colour but then they as a person might be a different colour (very confusing). I always find it a bit disconcerting when someone turns out to be the ‘wrong’ colour.

For example, the singer Jack Penate was very vibrant orange (because J is orange), but Jack has always been black to me so that was the first confusion. And then I saw a photo of Jack Penate and he SO was NOT orange and it was all wrong. He’s more of a fuzzy browny black in person.

I suppose it works the other way around too though – it’s quite nice when someone does match their colour, like Kate Nash. I had imagined her to be orangy brown from the first time I heard her (possibly because the song she sang was Caroline’s A Victim and ‘Caroline’ I saw as orange). It was refreshing to then see her on tv and realise that the colours I imagined weren’t a bad match for the colours of her in person.

I still haven’t been able to pinpoint what it is about a person that makes them a certain colour though. I think it will always remain a mystery.

hiding synaesthesia

The most recent conversation on the synaesthesia mailing list has been to do with hiding synaesthesia. A lot of people have reported how they have felt like they had to hide their synaesthesia from everyone including sometimes their families, for fear of ridicule, bullying or reactions from others like ‘you’re lying’.

I didn’t know that my coloured words were different, let alone had a name, until I was 19, so before that I didn’t really talk about it (thinking it was normal) so never felt like I had to hide it.

Until this conversation came up this week I thought that for the last few years I had been open about my synaesthesia. I was lucky enough to find a couple of people like me at university so it was fun to compare colours, so spoke about it occasionally then.

Now I tell people I know and trust, just because sometimes I have to explain why I get their name wrong or why I get certain words and things mixed up, but generally I keep it to myself. I suppose people assume that synaesthetes are just attention-seeking which is why I don’t mention it much.

It’s quite frustrating having to keep quiet though. If something is the ‘wrong’ colour, like for example if a graphic on a webpage doesn’t match the colour I see for the word on it, it bothers me constantly like a mosquito that just won’t fuck off. Or if a person’s name doesn’t match the colour I feel for them that can be really irritating too. And then I have to keep all this stupid annoyance to myself and it’s really distracting!

It’s a shame that some people really have to hide it because I think it’s really interesting, but I understand why. No-one wants to be laughed at (apart from comedians). I guess it’s such a difficult thing to explain that it’s easier to stay quiet.

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.

colours reflecting meaning

Although there are a lot of variations between synaesthetes, there are often similarities in certain things like letters of the alphabet – there are trends like ‘a’ is often red (mine’s black), ‘y’ is often yellow (mine’s yellow) and ‘z’ is often black (mine’s black).

I’d like to know if other synaesthetes see certain words the same too. Now with most words, it’s not the meaning of the the word that produces colour (e.g. the colour for ‘wall’ is grey for me but I’ve never seen a wall painted grey – it’s the letters in the word that are producing the colour).

But for certain words, words with very strong and vivid meanings and connotations, I’d like to know whether other synaesthetes see the colour of the meaning rather than the colour of the letters. Words I am thinking of specifically are things like this:

DEATH – SUNSHINE – FIRE – GRASS – BLOOD (blood is also shiny and rounded like a blob of hot red wax before it has set)

And what about non-synaesthetes? Do they see colours when they think of these words?

see how it feels

I saw a BMW advert last night with the strapline ’see how it feels’, and wondered if the whole advert had been inspired by music-colour synaesthesia.

You’ll see what I mean…

conceptual responses

Further to my earlier post about the number-colour test, I have found some clarification in the most recent issue of New Scientist (19 May 07) which I purchased yesterday.

The test (or one very similar, it doesn’t specify) was carried out by a leading synaesthesia researcher called Vilayanur Ramachandran, and he found that there were two different types of grapheme-colour synaesthetes: those who actually see the colours on the page and those who see the colours in their mind’s eye. I am of the latter group (the ones who can’t pick the 2s from the 5s) which according to this article means that the concept of the letter, not just the sensory data, causes the synaesthetic response.

That sounds about right to me. It fits with my previous thoughts that the colour responses stem from learnt associations or connections in the brain.

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.

music colour synaesthesia

One type of synaesthesia is music colour synaesthesia, where a note, key or certain quality in music causes the synaesthete to experience colour. Some music color synesthetes find the colours they see in music to be so distracting they can’t work while listening to music.

I find this fascinating because I don’t possess this kind of synaesthesia.

As a grapheme synaesthete, I do have colour responses to music but in a completely different way. For example, if I know the name of the song, then the song will be whichever colour I experience for the name (currently I’m listening to Sawdust and Diamonds by Joanna Newsom which is a lovely bright yellow for the whole 10 minutes of this epic song).

I am a very musical person (I play the piano, alto saxophone, surdo drum [brazilian] and a bit of clarinet, guitar and banjo) so in learning to read music I also had colour responses to keys and the letters of the notes if I knew which ones were being played, plus the instrument itself, because all instrument, like all words, have colours too.

Also, major and minor keys have an impact on the colours I perceive – minor keys generally add a black/grey/brown tinge to the letter of the key.

Although all this extra colour information is going on in my head it’s not overwhelming or distracting, it’s just there without intruding which is pretty lucky I guess.