synaesthesia Q&A (part 2)

Do you ever confuse your synesthetic perceptions with the external world, or are they in completely separate dimensions?

I do not confuse them; they are in separate dimensions.

What makes these dimensions different?

The colours are never so overwhelming I can’t distinguish what’s what

Some synesthetes have the experience of color when they look at (or think about) digits or letters of the alphabet. This is called Grapheme-Color synesthesia.

What feature(s) of the stimulus determine which color you see?

The concept of the letter (e.g., just thinking about ‘M’ induces a color)

Is the same synesthetic color associated with a particular letter whether you are thinking about the letter versus seeing the letter on a page?

The colors are different.

The colour is a lot more vivid when I am thinking about it, because when it’s written on a page it’s probably written in black or blue, and then when I focus on it I get the synaesthetic perception, but when I just think about it, I see the letter in my mind, and it is written in the colour it should be rather than just black on a page

How does your synesthesia change when you see letters or numbers in combination? Is there a simple set of rules that would explain what you see (e.g. the color for 12 would be some combination of the colors for 1 and 2, or the word ‘fax’ has the colors of both F and X)?

Numbers generally blend like paint, but words don’t have a general rule. Sometimes there’s a dominant letter (not necessarily the first letter) that makes the whole word one colour, sometimes its association changes the colour, sometimes the letters blend like paint and sometimes a word is just blocks of colour next to each other.

How does your synesthesia change when you are reading text?

It’s not so prominent because when I read fast it’s just a lot of black text. It’s only when I read slowly or stop on a word that I notice the synaesthesia more.

How does your synesthesia change when you are writing text?

Slightly more noticeable than reading just because it’s slower and I’m thinking more about the words.

Is your synesthesia different when you are looking at other languages that share our alphabet (such as Spanish or German)?

Yes

There are certain quirks, like ‘jouer’ in french (to play) is light green when it should be dark orange if I’m going by the letters, but then there are quirks in English too so I don’t know if it’s a real difference. If it’s a language I know very little of, the whole language will be the colour of the name of the language (e.g. Spain is yellow and Spanish is mainly yellow) but once I get to know the language then more colours start to emerge.

Is your synesthesia different when you are looking at other languages that have a different alphabet or script (Chinese, Hebrew, etc)?

Yes

I tried to learn Japanese – it was all black/dark purple

If you have synesthesia with digits, is it different when you look at Roman numerals?

Yes

They are all grey/black

When most people see color, it is usually associated with some object in the world. How do you see your synesthetic color?

It exists in my mind’s eye.

It’s vivid and yet transparent

In your synesthesia, do you see many different colors or only a few?

Many different colors

How would you best describe your synesthetic colors?

Transparent

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.