Fridays are green
When you're young you might decide this doll is happy, that teddy is grumpy. The Jack of Spades is haughty, the Queen of Diamonds is shy. Thursdays are orangey-brown, Fridays are green. As you grow up you put these thoughts behind you and pretend to be a real adult. You might still feel, deep down, that the Queen of Spades is a stroppy cow, but you assume this is just a memory of the eight-year-old you once were.
A couple of months ago I was watching QI and they mentioned synaesthesia. I'd heard of this before and it sounded Quite Interesting, in the same way a documentary about small African shrews can be interesting, but I'd never considered it further before. Then the quizmaster, Stephen Fry, talked about Rimsky-Korsakov thinking various musical keys were coloured, and played some examples. I found myself thinking "Well that one's obviously green. And that's definitely orange. And of course that one's blue, how could it be anything else?"
Having got interested in the subject again, I then went and did a bit of research. I had assumed when I'd heard it described before that synaesthesia was an overwhelming experience, strongly affecting normal life, much as described in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger Tiger). It was quite a revelation to discover that it could be a fairly mild, even "normal" experience, and that it could be easy to not realise you have it. After all, do you know whether other people's minds work like yours? Is your memory more or less visual than average? Do you have an internal musical soundtrack, or remember the author of a book by picturing where it was on the library shelf? And how do you know if your best friend does the same?
It's been fascinating, and in many ways liberating, to realise I am a mild synaesthete. I'm focussing on it quite a lot right now - rather than ignoring the added information, I'm consciously wondering what colour, texture or shape everything is. Did you know that my friend Kirsi is lemon yellow? The letter B is red? March is orange with jagged bits? Nor did I really - I did know once, but I'd put all that aside while pretending to be a proper adult.
I don't mean this to sound like I think synaesthesia is childish - certainly not. It's just that I'd been convinced that since adults didn't talk about that sort of thing, it must just be left-over from childhood. Hence my huge feeling of liberation to discover there's a name for it, it's OK to think like that, and Fridays really are green. To me anyway.
A couple of months ago I was watching QI and they mentioned synaesthesia. I'd heard of this before and it sounded Quite Interesting, in the same way a documentary about small African shrews can be interesting, but I'd never considered it further before. Then the quizmaster, Stephen Fry, talked about Rimsky-Korsakov thinking various musical keys were coloured, and played some examples. I found myself thinking "Well that one's obviously green. And that's definitely orange. And of course that one's blue, how could it be anything else?"
Having got interested in the subject again, I then went and did a bit of research. I had assumed when I'd heard it described before that synaesthesia was an overwhelming experience, strongly affecting normal life, much as described in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger Tiger). It was quite a revelation to discover that it could be a fairly mild, even "normal" experience, and that it could be easy to not realise you have it. After all, do you know whether other people's minds work like yours? Is your memory more or less visual than average? Do you have an internal musical soundtrack, or remember the author of a book by picturing where it was on the library shelf? And how do you know if your best friend does the same?
It's been fascinating, and in many ways liberating, to realise I am a mild synaesthete. I'm focussing on it quite a lot right now - rather than ignoring the added information, I'm consciously wondering what colour, texture or shape everything is. Did you know that my friend Kirsi is lemon yellow? The letter B is red? March is orange with jagged bits? Nor did I really - I did know once, but I'd put all that aside while pretending to be a proper adult.
I don't mean this to sound like I think synaesthesia is childish - certainly not. It's just that I'd been convinced that since adults didn't talk about that sort of thing, it must just be left-over from childhood. Hence my huge feeling of liberation to discover there's a name for it, it's OK to think like that, and Fridays really are green. To me anyway.