Anecdotal Evidence Theater, Essay Version

[corivax]

There have been three interesting public posts on my friends list about synaesthesia of late. ( 1, 2, 3), plus two interesting friends-locked ones. Far be it from me to do anything other than mindlessly follow the cool kids!

I think "synaesthesia" as the official medical definition goes is reasonably uncommon, but most people I've talked to have

Comments

[caladri]

You actually feel things being out of place, don't you? Your body language really betrays that. Likewise, I suspect mine betrays that it's a relative-position/spatial thing for me. I've noticed recently that the way I move my hands around sometimes seems to relate to the way I'm manipulating stuff in my head. For example, last night when I was trying to figure out how many days to Thursday (or was that the night before - whatever), I was seeing this bouncing ball (like karaoke ones) going between this linear set of blocks representing days, searching for the one in question, and then counting the number of day-length lines between the points where the ball had dropped, and I realized that my hands were manipulating those lines in space in front of me.

touch

[corivax]

You might be amused by this, which I only now thought of as relevant: silenceleigh's description of math as a tangible process.

Re: touch

[caladri]

That's fairly interesting! My early exposure to maths and some slightly-higher maths meant that I came up with a lot of similar ways for working with things. Nearly everything is a matter of manipulating triangles in my head, and I do most large-number maths using approximations and ratios and a very mind's-eye-visual feel for getting things to line up right. It's like I have a broken maths compiler, or maybe just a weird instruction set, and I can only work with 16-bit immediates, but I can shift around and get the right results with some odd transformations :)

[corivax]

I'm interested in all sorts of idiosyncratic sensory issues. I don't know f those are "real" synaesthesia, but they're still the sort of thing I was asking about, and reading them makes me happy. :) I find the perception of "order" really fascinating. Maybe I will pelt you with questions sometime in person.