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.

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.

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.