Synaethesia
Feb. 19th, 2004 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ladyelaine made a couple of posts about synaethesia, which is the mixing up of sensory inputs. So you can, for example, hear in colour. A common form is seeing written letters in colour. (yes, I know they're all black on the page. That's irrelevant). Many synaethetes seem to be female and left-handed or ambidextrous (I'm ambi).My imagination and perception are highly visual anyway, and my (mild) synaethesia is mainly based in colour. Only certain sounds and textures have a colour (the smell of tar is brown, fish kegeree is red). The smell of roses is, weirdly, pale blue, and they have a sound like the top notes of a xylophone (From this I conclude that the smell of roses is 'high frequency'; it affects my olofactory nerves in the same way as a high-pitched sound affects my auditory ones, or a high-frequency colour affects me visually.) The texture of carpet is grey-green. Chocolate tastes and smells purple.
The musical scale, if I want it to, has a corresponding visual scale from black through brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and white to silver.
Sometimes when I'm dropping off to sleep, I see experiences as a complex design of colours and patterns. It always seems significant, but I can never grasp it.
What I primarily see, though, is concepts and people in colour. Each number has its own colour. 0 is transparent, 1 is off-white, 2 is lemon yellow, 3 is green, 4 is blueish-purple, 5 is dark green, 6 is medium blue, 7 is dark grey, 8 is purple, 9 is red, and 10, 11, 12 (on a clock) are deepening shades of brown. The square root of -1 is a fetching shade of mauve.
Abstract concepts are coloured too, but luminous. Goodness is white, white like the sun, not a piece of paper. (God is also white and luminous. And He's circular. That probably mean goodness is the foremost of his attributes in my mind). Justice is blue, so is truth, of a slightly lighter shade. Beauty is medium green. Love and mercy are shdes of light red. Evil is black, but it's luminous too. It's not something you ever actually see, black light. (Maybe it's octarine!)
People get colours, one dominant one and maybe one or two others. I remember telling my first teacher (old woman, self described 'militant Christian', right-winger, holy terror, played the accordian) that she was black. Which she, of course took in an entirely different context. :-D
My mother is chocolate brown, my father and Christopher are light blue, my sister is red-orange. Pamela, my roommate in first year, is brownish-orange.
doyle_sb4 is grey with tones of purple. (As for the rest of you, you can see what colours you are on my flist. It always interests me to see what colour you make me). Generally, women are 'warm' colours while men are 'cold' ones (and there's some everyday synaesthesia), but not always. Fictional characters don't escape either. Leia is dark brown, Padmé is red-brown with orange overtones, Han is tan-colour, and Luke is bright blue. Obi-Wan is cream, and Anakin is practically pyschadelic (He's dark red and purple with some brown shading to black. The black increases when he's Vader).
Sometimes you can see a reason for the colour. Harry is dark green and red (his eyes and Gryffindor, I imagine), while Draco Malfoy is silver. Luna is white, and she sparkles. Neville is yellow and grey. Ginny is light green and brown, and Hermione is golden brown with light blue overtones. Ron seems to shift, but is mainly red and navy blue. The Good Ship is red and brown, for some reason.
Yes, it's all very bizarre. Does anyone else think this way? It would be interesting to see if any of it was the same.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 06:20 pm (UTC)he's doing research into Synaesthesia at Cambridge.
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Date: 2004-02-20 03:41 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-20 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 11:04 pm (UTC)My roommate is bright blue. And I think of you as a darker, sort of cordoroy colored blue.
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Date: 2004-02-20 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-20 01:27 am (UTC)Do you mean that, for any scale, the first degree ("do") seems like black to you, "re" like brown, "mi" like red, and so forth? Or does it start with C and work upwards? Is it by whole steps or half-steps?
I happen to have absolute pitch, and also tend to associate brighter colors with sharper keys: A flat major seems like a purple sort of key, E flat a foresty green, B flat a fairly deep blue, F and C lighter blues (C a very light ice-blue); G major is sort of a wooden light brown, D major a golden yellow, A major a brilliant red. I also associate the major keys with different times of the day: sharp keys seem like morning keys, flats evening.
What's even weirder is the daylight-associations I get with different scriptural passages. The Abraham narrative seems to take place mostly in a sort of dim twilit haze, with the Jacob and Joseph narratives emerging into a fuller daylight-- Moses daylight, Joshua fading, Judges very dim, Samuel and David becoming well-lit again. Probably this is mostly a function of how well-ordered the society being described is, but that doesn't quite seem to explain it all. I'm not sure.
Anyway, that's of course not a proper synaesthesia, but it seemed similar enough to be of interest in response to your post.
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Date: 2004-02-20 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-20 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-20 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-21 04:44 pm (UTC)You don't know me, I just surfed in via AJ Hall's lj. I think of numbers as colours, but not nearly as strongly as you do. I always thought it was because I used rods as a child. These were coloured rods used to teach children about numbers in the 1960s. A one was white, two red, three green etc. And three is definitely green for me. But I know absolutely that odd numbers are cool coloured and even numbers warm.
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Date: 2004-02-21 09:37 pm (UTC)