Calling all synesthetes!

[cleolinda]

This is going to take some explaining, so I'll go ahead and throw it out here on its own right now: heyorion is looking for some synesthetes to take a battery of online tests ("All the info I need from people is the synaesthesia battery completed, their age, sex and mother tongue. Sadly, I can't offer any payment, but people get to see their own results afterwards, and they can come back and test how consistent they are if they're into that kind of synaesthesia geekery"). Synesthesia is basically "a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color" (AHD):

In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise). Yet another recently identified type, visual motion → sound synesthesia, involves hearing sounds in response to visual motion and flicker. (W)

I've talked about synesthesia here before--but reading over this just now, I was kind of surprised to realize that I do most of these (I'd thought I only really did numbers and a couple other things). Numbers, letters, days, months, names, songs and even smells all have distinct colors to me. (BPAL's Siren, which I have in my oil diffuser right now, has a vivid tawny-red-peach color. The month of October is kind of grey-brown with a vermilionish color running through it. 29 is leaf green and [steel? slate?] blue. Wednesday is kind of a greenish blue. Paramore's "Decode" [SHUT UP] is a dark, dim grey-purple, but the word Paramore is kind of a raspberry pink. Actually, words and letters usually appear in a large black Times New Roman font in my mind, although if you sat me down and asked me, say, "What color is the word serendipity?," I could tell you that it's mostly a golden yellow with a little pink in it.) I think it may be that I'm a very visual person--if all you give me in class is a spoken lecture, I am totally at sea--so I tend to translate any other senses into some kind of color or visual. Or vice versa, maybe--that's why I'm a visual person. I don't know. Anyway, if any of this sounds familiar to you ("Bitch, please--Wednesday is red" ), think about heading on over and taking the tests.

Comments

[mercat.livejournal.com]

Huh, I've never heard of the time-setting synaesthesia, but I definitely picture timelines (or at least *feel* them, when I concentrate I can't really see them enough to explain them). I'll definitely have to check that out, I guess. :)

[celestinenox]

Does it count if China is green and Spain is yellow?

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

I would think so, hee.

[stagemanager.livejournal.com]

I always see years as sheets of (paper? plastic?) that stretch from left (Jan) to right (Dec) and each year is connected to the next and previous; is this in any way what they're looking for?

And Wednesday doesn't have it's own color.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that could be. Although it kind of sounds like they want two specific kinds of synesthetes--I wonder if you could go back to her (?) original comment and ask her?

[rosefox8.livejournal.com]

What if your synesthesia involves only a blending of color, sound, emotion, physical sensation, and temperature?

[heyorion.livejournal.com]

Check out the links I've posted below - we'd still be delighted to hear from you!

[ararejul.livejournal.com]

i always wished i had Synesthesia; it sounds so fascinating.
:D and since i'm a highly visual person i think it'd be pretty cool.

I think my favorite form might be hearing music to color though. that seems pretty awesome. or horrible.. depending. i'd just go stare at Rothko's all day long.

[heyorion.livejournal.com]

Hi everyone! I am a she, by the way - my name is Clare :) If you have any questions about your synaesthesia, I'll do my best to answer them here. If you prefer privacy, then my email is c.jonas@sussex.ac.uk.

I'm specifically looking for number-colour and letter-colour synaesthetes (i.e. people who have colours for numbers and/or letters) but if you have another kind and you'd like to take part in research, there are a number of research groups scattered around the world. Different ones have different specialisations, but we're glad to hear from you whatever kind you have!

I belong to the group at Sussex University (http://www.syn.sussex.ac.uk/), in Brighton, England - currently interested in number-colour, letter-colour, spatial sequences and synaesthesia in the deaf. University College London is allied to Sussex, and deals mostly with synaesthesias involving touch.
Edinburgh is also allied to Sussex, and is interested in synaesthesia in children and lexical-gustatory ("tasty words") syn (http://www.syn.psy.ed.ac.uk/)

These are the ones I am not so familiar with. There are probably more, but these are all the ones I can remember at the moment.
Brunel, UK: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~hsstnns/synaesthesia_RESEARCH.html
University of East London, UK: http://www.uel.ac.uk/psychology/research/synaesthesia/
University of Waterloo, Canada: http://www.synaesthesia.uwaterloo.ca/
Trinity College, Dublin: http://www.tcd.ie/Psychology/synres/
Cambridge, UK: http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/synaesthesia/
Macquarie University, Sydney: http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/research/projects/synaesthesia/index.htm

And finally, some general information on synaesthesia/American Synaesthesia Association: http://www.synesthesia.info/

[tundraeternal.livejournal.com]

Hey! I'm taking your letter/color and number/color thing. After clicking quite a few colors, I notice that the test seems to be asking only about capital letters. My associations are much stronger with lower case letters. So I keep feeling like I'm 'translating' the uppercase letter you show, to the lowercase letter, and then sometimes I mark the strong color for the lowercase letter, and sometimes the uppercase letter evokes a different color and I pick that, and I'm starting to feel like I'm doing it wrong. Did I miss a tickybox somewhere on the first page that had a choice between uppercase and lowercase? Should I stop now before I screw up your data?

[jharrison19.livejournal.com]

I love this kind of stuff. Numbers have relationships for me and music has very vivid color. Most things have distinct feelings and a general color. Numbers involving nine have red and blue, but not purple. Decode is deep blues and greens with spots of yellow. I can't stop listening dammit!

[heyorion.livejournal.com]

The numbers-having-relationships thing is called ordinal linguistic personification, if you want to google it. My favourite ever description was from one of my friends - she said that zero was like Harold Bishop from Neighbours - which may not make much sense if you don't know Neighbours; basically, well-meaning but pompous.

[kethlenda.livejournal.com]

I ought to look into this--I associate colors with all kinds of weird stuff, and visualize time in a really complicated visual way.

[sapphires13.livejournal.com]

I must definitely have time-setting synesthesia.

I've always seen individual years as stretched out vertically, each month below the previous, and laid side by side in columns (so January 2006, 2007, 2008 are all next to each other, left to right, at the top of the columns.

Decades are stacked atop eachother, (1960s on top of 1950s, 1950s on top of 1940s), with the years stretching out bottom to top (1959 is below 1960), the exception to this is that the 1980s are next to (to the right of to be precise) the 1970s. I can only assume this is because I was born in the 1980s. The 1990s continue atop the 1980s, and the 2000s atop that... which is also an exception to the next part:

Centuries (which have formed a single column of decades) are aligned next to each other, left to right, going backwards in time (meaning that the 1980s and 1990s actually overlap the 1880s and 1890s, in a three-dimensional view), all the way past year zero (there are no individual breaks or alignments for mellinnia) where the BC years continue on in their backwards way.

It's all very specific, and when I think of a year or point and time, I picture it on the timeline map.


But I've only ever experience music synesthesia with a couple of select songs. One going so far as to see separate colours/movements for individual parts of the song, all arranged together.

[mercymydarling.livejournal.com]

Heading on over where now? I'm for participation. Sounds have colors and textures for me.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Go to the link in the first sentence--she explains how to log in there.

[lonefire08.livejournal.com]

I'm very visual - every letter has its own colour when by itself, otherwise it's black and either Times New Roman or Arial (depends on what I've been typing in lately), most numbers are black, except the cardinal numbers and 42, every month has it's own colour, music has it's own colour, tones have their own colour, instruments have their own colour... lost of things have their own colour. Pretty much everything, in fact.

*Goes to take the test for the researcher*

[slickmeister.livejournal.com]

Took the battery... the most I have, really, with the ones tested was the days of the week/months of the year, but I have more of a tendancy to associate sounds with both taste and color..which is hard to test online, I'm guessing. *l*

[anne-jumps.livejournal.com]

Aw, I wish I had this. It sounds fun.

[fiberaddict.livejournal.com]

Huh..the only synesthesia I have is that I taste in colors.

[katharhino.livejournal.com]

My sister and I used to argue about the colors of the days of the week, to the mystification of my brother. "That doesn't make any sense! You're just making it up!"

Before I learned about synesthesia I thought I was sort of making it up, because it's like imagination in a way, all in your head. But then, I know it's real if I think about it. I can't just change my mind and make myself see Wednesday as purple. Purple Wednesday -- that is just WRONG! Purple is so un-Wednesday-ish!

I see days of the week and months with colors, and some numbers, a little bit, but not letters.

[swarles.livejournal.com]

Words with colors sound interesting. I've read that some people see colors when they hear music which is just the most fascinating thing ever, I think. The only thing in my life that have colors are headaches.

[heyorion.livejournal.com]

Pain-colour is not that uncommon, at least in the world of synaesthesia - far more common than plain touch-colour, for some reason. It might be to do with the auras people get with migraines, perhaps?

[thenotoriousso4.livejournal.com]

Um... I didn't realize that thinking about numbers and dates as a space in time was odd. Because I do that.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

I didn't realise that it was unusual, either. Numbers, especially dates, have size and relative locations.

[queenthesixth.livejournal.com]

Wow, live and learn. I just associate numbers with personalities. Been doing it since I was young and I really just thought it was from day-dreaming and been overly imaginative, like others have commented.

Nice to know it's part of something else and not just me being odd.

[heyorion.livejournal.com]

A lot of synaesthetes I've spoken to have only found out their synaesthesia is unusual later on in life. The most extreme case I've met is someone who didn't realise till her mid-50s. I guess it's just not the kind of thing you talk about, and it's partly genetic anyway so even if you do bring it up (with your family) you're not likely to be told that other people don't do that.

[vega-ofthe-lyre.livejournal.com]

I... definitely have whatever the timesetting/numberline synaesthesia is, and I also have... um. Well, whenever I encounter the spoken word (even if I'm just thinking to myself, which I realise doesn't make sense) I see it in the form of typed text in my mind, white text on a black background. Which I realise doesn't qualify me for whatever this research is, but... anyone know anything about what I have? :D

[vega-ofthe-lyre.livejournal.com]

Oh, and my sister sees colours and shapes when she listens to music (which I'm jealous of), and my mother also has the numberline thing.

[stefficus.livejournal.com]

i was just talking about this the other day while testing out my new BPAL haul! i think i have a sort of reverse synesthesia in that i have trouble smelling things if it's too loud. i suppose it's part of the same brain wiring a lot of people have where they listen to music with their eyes closed, which of course i always do. i've been known to turn the radio down so i could see to drive, stuff like that.

i think i have some mild synesthesia also. it's very specific, however. some numbers have personalities. some flavors and smells have shapes (the ifrit from the neil gaiman collection, for example, is shaped exactly like a mini marshmallow. it does not, in any way, smell like marshmallows, and it's more the texture of a pencil eraser (which is also does not smell like), but it's totally marshmallow-shaped), but only a few. overall though, i have a tendency to refer to smells as colors. in part, that's a limit of language, but i FEEL the colors. i don't usually, however, see them. hm.

i'm definitely now what you're looking for from a research standpoint, but i'll spread it around. ;)

[heyorion.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! Your synaesthesia sounds pretty cool, even if it isn't what I'm looking for at the moment :)

[cpip.livejournal.com]

...I have never quite understood synesthesia, possibly because I don't have it. Is it strong associations, or visual hallucinations, or what? That's the part I never got.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Strong associations, I guess. It's not hallucinations, I wouldn't say; I don't see it outside my mind's eye. It's just, like--if you said, "Picture the number three in your head. What color is it?" I would say "Yellow." It's not that I stopped and said, "What would be a good color for the number three?" It's just that I automatically always think of three as yellow, or January as red, or the letter B as blue. But it's not like I see colors unless I stop to think about it--I don't have colors swirling around me involuntarily all hours of the day. It's just like--when you picture a single word or symbol in your head the way you'd picture anything else (a scene, a memory, a daydream), you have a strong automatic color association with that visual that you didn't have to stop and choose. Well, with color synesthesia, anyway.

[flaxenescapee.livejournal.com]

I just found out about synesthesia maybe a year ago, and completely by accident. And thus I had no idea that there were those who did not experience things this way, nevermind the fact that this isn't supposed to be common. So it's great to see someone who is also an oddball, haha.:]
Off to I go take tests!

[pinstripe-bindi.livejournal.com]

"Serendipity" has always been a bright chartreuse to me.

[divabat.livejournal.com]

Ha! I see colours in songs and emotions (fear's orange-blue and panic attacks look like green/black Dementors) and I can hear touch, which is slightly odd. Also certain spatial arrangement corresponds to musical notes for me. Checking out the battery!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'm as intense a synaesthete as some, but as long as I can remember, I have assigned a gender to each letter of the English alphabet. It's fixed. Never changes. Numbers 1-10 have fixed gender as well.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

You know... I do that too. The numbers for sure. I'm not sure about all the letters.