torsdag 9. mai 2013

Synesthesia

Maria Mena was on Skavlan (a Norwegian/Swedish talk show) some weeks ago. And she has synesthesia.

Hers is not the same as mine, she can actually use it to make her music; by putting the right colors, corresponding to musical notes, together. I just associate a color to each letter in our alphabet and numbers. And to the weekdays and the months. I also have a strong visual perception of abstract concepts like years and weeks.

But by listening to her talking about it I managed to finally catch the name of this condition (even though I've known about it for a while, I've never managed to remember the name of it), so I wikipedied it.

On the top right corner of the English Wikipedia article there's an image illustrating how a person with synesthesia might perceive the letters of this word.

This is when I discover that my Grapheme → color synesthesia might be stronger than I thought. 'cause I found this image somewhat uncomfortable to look at.
All the letters are the wrong color.
(Which is fine if there's some aesthetic reason and the colors match, but this combination of colors was just a mess and to me without reason or order).

Maybe it's my ocd colliding with my synesthesia. ...XD

For those curious, this is how I perceive these letters:


Does this make anyone else uncomfortable like the Wikipedia image made me?
I find it quite fascinating that people with the same condition will assign different colors to different concepts (even though it makes perfect sense; we are different persons after all).


Oh, and while we're at the subject. Some weeks ago I was chatting with some friends (my boyfriend and my girlfriend's boyfriend) and I mentioned that I like some numbers better than others without knowing what determined if I like them or not. We wondered if the ones I like might be prime numbers, but when I reflected on this later I quickly discovered they were not (not exclusively).
Then, while researching synesthesia I got the idea that it may have a connection to the colors.
And it does!
I really like the red or otherwise warm-colored numbers. The blue ones are ok. The yellow ones are kinda special and fun. I don't like the pink ones and the white ones are neutral. And then there's 11, which is sort of a light beige-gray and one of a kind and (therefore?) my favorite of them all.

Then again, this doesn't answer why I like the ones I like 'cause I do not know why they got their respective colors...



(Isn't it weird how specific numbers got a different color than their contents? Like 10 being yellow even though 1 and 0 are both white. And 20 (being blue) is a greener shade than 2.)

So.
Synesthesia.
Anyone else?


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