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.

i wonder

I’d be interested to know what percentage of grapheme-colour synaesthetes actually ‘pass’ this test…

If a grapheme-colour synaesthete (such as myself) is shown this…

…then according to research, the synaesthete should be able to identify the shape within the image…

To me, the original image is just a load of black shapes on a page that don’t even look like 5s and 2s. There’s certainly no colour that pops out at me on the page. A page of black text is a page of black text and yet every letter and number is a colour when I think about it. I just wonder which is most common amongst grapheme-colour synaesthetes – actually seeing bold colours on a page of text or just knowing the colours are there but not actually seeing them instantly.