Photo

Another photo of mine to break up the text…

Busy writing

Hey everyone, thanks for continuing to read the blog and commenting on the various posts. Even though I don’t have time to reply to them very often I still read them all and they remind me I should really update this more often!

Lately I’ve been busy writing – writing is one of those ‘dream job’ things for me; always wanted to end up as a writer but always put it to the back of my mind thinking well so do loads of people. For that reason I never wrote a thing, convinced anything I put to paper would be terrible.

But we’re into a new decade now so I thought why the hell not! So that’s what I’ve been busy doing. I decided to start with short stories because there are a lot of short story competitions out there and I knew that setting goals like entering the competitions would spur me on.

‘How’s this relevant?’ I hear you say! I’ve decided to enter the Ambit (200 words) competition with a synaesthesia-related bit of semi-prose semi-poetry.

At the moment I haven’t got a clue whether what I’ve written sounds completely bonkers or whether it sort of makes sense, but once the competition has been and gone and I’m happy with my entry I’ll post it on here to see what you think.

Back to the old writing… I’ll leave you with an author recommendation, someone who I absolutely love right now – Haruki Murakami. His short stories especially are inspired. I can’t stop reading his work.

Replying to comments Part 2

Thanks for all your questions folks, here’s answers to a few more….

From Chris, 29th Sept 09
Q: What way do you see your synesthesia. As a progector or an associator?
A: I’m an associator – the colours are in my mind’s eye not in external space.

From Vivian, 27th Sept 09
Q: Is it possible to have just pain synethesia? I dont have any others exept I do see the color red when thinking of it.
A: I suppose so, though I’m not a scientist, just a synaesthete. Maybe non-synaesthetes can tell us if they see pain as red?

From Tasha, 11th August 09
Q:What do you find most difficult?
What do you enjoy about it?
What if anything makes you feel lonely or isolated about having syn?
A: The most difficult thing is when the colour I see for a person doesn’t match the colour their personality projects – then I tend to forget their name or get them mixed up with someone else.
I enjoy (love!) everything about it, it’s part of me, and I love seeing colour all the time.
For me synaethesia causes no loneliness or isolation.

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…

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.

music-colour synaesthesia revisited

My post on music-colour synaesthesia has been the most visited item on my blog, and has also become the most interesting area of synaesthesia to me recently.

I have been, for a while, fairly convinced that I have grapheme-colour synaesthesia (I see words, numbers, names as colours) and nothing else. But since taking a synesthesia quiz which involved a section on music, where I scored quite highly for syn in some of the musical areas, I have started to think more and more about music-colour synaesthesia.

I have come to believe that in certain circumstances I DO actually experience synaesthetic perceptions in music, but that I had never really noticed before. But since I only see colours in my mind’s eye rather than actually SEEING them in front of my eyes, it is difficult to determine what causes the occasional synaesthesia responses.

A lot of the time, it is just the name of the song or artist that provides the overall colour of the song, which would still make it grapheme-colour synaesthesia. For example, the song ‘Peach, Plum, Pear’ by Joanna Newsom is a deep purply colour and I can only assume I am seeing a plum colour (although I am still unaware as to why plum would stand out more than peach or pear). But while listening to Anxiety Attack by Jeffrey Lewis I started to see flashing black and pink spots in the intro to the song.

I thought it was quite interesting, but I am still not sure what to make of it. It just seems, as usual, to be a useless quirk that doesn’t really mean anything. I still like it though.

mirror-touch synaesthesia

I recently read an intriguing article about a type of synaesthesia I had never heard of before.

The article comes from Live Science and here is an extract:

‘A brain anomaly can make the saying “I know how you feel” literally true in hyper-empathetic people who actually sense that they are being touched when they witness others being touched.

The condition, known as mirror-touch synesthesia, is related to the activity of mirror neurons, cells recently discovered to fire not only when some animals perform some behavior, such as climbing a tree, but also when they watch another animal do the behavior. For “synesthetes,” it’s as if their mirror neurons are on overdrive.

“We often flinch when we see someone knock their arm, and this may be a weaker version of what these synesthetes experience,” University College London cognitive neuroscientist Jamie Ward said.

Now scientists find these synesthetes possess an unusually strong ability to empathize with others. Further research into this condition might shed light on the roots of empathy, which could help better understand autism, schizophrenia, psychopathy and other disorders linked with empathy.’

…read the rest of the article here.

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.