Replying to comments Part 1

There have been so many comments on the blog since I stopped writing so I will try and reply to some even if they were from as far back as 2007, because my answers might be the answers other people are searching for too.

Anna (comment on ‘music colour synaesthesia’  June 20th 2007) – it’s good that you found out about what your daughter was experiencing. I don’t know of any particular synaesthesia tests but it’s my personal opinion that synaesthesia is so diverse and complicated that standard tests may not be satisfactory and don’t really prove anything anyway. I hope your daughter is able to enjoy her colours and sensations.

Sam (comment on ‘music colour synaesthesia’ May 30th 2008) – Oliver Sacks is pretty cool isn’t he – I’m reading ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’ at the moment which is fantastic. I haven’t read Musicophilia though so I’ll have to buy that next. At the moment I think I only see colours rather than experience hallucinatory sensations, but similar to you I do find that my synaesthesia evolves, or I notice it in different circumstances, so I don’t rule anything out.

More answers to come…

My Absence

I’ve been absent from this blog for a long time.

I’m constantly surprised and heartened when people still find this blog and post questions or tell me about their own experiences. Thank you readers, I love reading your comments.

I will try and resume this blog from now on, and try and be more active in responding to messages.

I’ll be back with a question I’d like to ask synaesthetes, a mini survey I suppose.

For now, photography is what keeps me going so I’ll post a photo as often as I can just so you have something to look at instead of reading so much text…

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.

a quick thought on dyslexia

While copying some text and numbers from a printed page into a Word document (and getting a few of the words and numbers mixed up along the way), it made me think about dyslexia in relation to synesthesia.

I don’t have dyslexia myself (I think my brain was just refusing to work today) but I wonder if there are any synaesthetes – I’m talking about grapheme-colour synaesthetes mainly – who are also dyslexic. There must be some out there, and if so, how do they experience colours in response to letters and words? Is there a difference compared to how a non-dyslexic synaesthesia would see them?

According to Dyslexia Action, Dyslexic people usually find it difficult to analyse and work with the sounds of spoken words, and many have difficulties with short-term memory, sequencing and organisation. This means that it is more difficult for them to learn how spoken sounds map onto letters, which affects the ability to spell and the ability to decode or ‘sound out’ words.

If synaesthesia is combined with dyslexia, does it make it even harder to process language? Do the colours conflict with the letters in the words? Or alternatively, can the synaesthesia help with spelling?

These are questions I’ll never find the answers to unless I can find a dyslexic synaesthete, but I thought I’d write down my thoughts on it anyway.

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.