Light indigo, slightly-yellow orange, sea green, sea green, somewhat more yellow orange (i.e. hello)
Hi all! I'm new here. My synesthesia types, for anyone curious:
- Grapheme→color synesthesia
- What I'm currently calling "song→color synesthesia". That is, different songs have different color schemes, but with the exception of video game music and (to a lesser extent) songs with colors in the titles, the colors seem arbitrary; while any given song consistently has the same palette, I haven't found a pattern between the palette and the tones, instruments, tempo, or in some cases, even the title of a song. (Clannad's "I See Red" actually has a gray palette with some green and light blue mixed in!)
- Grapheme→personality synesthesia with highly varied degrees of vividness. The only grapheme that has even some specifics in its physical appearance is 8, which reminds me of a young girl with blonde hair that wears pink. (Oddly, even though this is the only semi-specific physical appearance that a grapheme reminds me of, it isn't based on anyone in particular. Even more odd is that neither the hair or clothing match 8's grapheme→color synesthesia color, which is orange.) Only three other graphemes even have personalities or vague physical appearances: 3 and 7 are jokers, and 9 is like a beautiful woman. (Another strange thing - I often associate anyone with a "beautiful woman"-esque personality with my #1 celebrity crush, Enya, yet 9 still doesn't "look like" Enya.) Some of the other graphemes (including letters now) only have genders, while others don't even have that.
- VERY limited music→taste synesthesia. So far, there is only one time that I've had this. See, ketchup-flavored potato chips were once available in the United States, but sadly, they aren't anymore; but in the time that they were, the Hightail Falls Galaxy music from Super Mario Galaxy 2 tasted like them (after I'd tried them, of course). Unless putting actual ketchup on any other flavor of chips does the same thing to that music (I have yet to attempt it), that was probably the only time I'll ever have music→taste synesthesia.
A few questions:
1) Until I read Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet, I didn't know I had any of these. But this isn't the usual "synesthete's associations were always as vivid as they are today, but at first they thought everyone perceived the same thing" scenario. Rather, before then I hardly even noticed that letters and numbers seemed to naturally have colors in my mind, and when I did, it was usually just based on the letter and number magnets I used to play with and/or Barney's Number Friends (which, in my childhood, was probably my favorite book).
After I read some of Born on a Blue Day (I still have yet to read all of it), I started noticing that, indeed, I had grapheme→color synesthesia, but it was still pretty vague - it took me a long time to decide that C was blue (and even that wasn't quite accurate, as now it seems more like indigo) and that B was orange (same thing - now, it's more of a reddish-orange), but since C didn't match my letter magnets (because, if I remember correctly, the magnet C's were yellow), I knew I had to have grapheme→color synesthesia. I still didn't notice my grapheme→personality synesthesia until much later when I randomly thought about Daniel's again, nor did I notice my song→color synesthesia until I saw someone mention it on some forum/blog I don't remember the name of.
It wasn't until I posted to autism about this much later that I tried to make a complete list of my perceived colors for graphemes, and there were still some that weren't clear enough, so I had to guess. Some of the once ones (stupid typos) I guessed turned out to be wrong later on - for instance, I guessed that 8 was pink (based on Barney's Number Friends), but later on, looking at an 8, I realized that it was actually easier to imagine it as orange than as pink. Even now, most of the graphemes that I perceive as green (F, J, L, T, V, Y, and 7; the last 3 are the exceptions) seem to change shades every now and then, making it difficult to remember new words beginning with F, J, L, or T. Then again, C and N used to keep switching colors in the same way but finally settled on C as indigo and N as blue, so there's hope.
The point is, even though my grapheme→color synesthesia seems to have been given to me by Born on a Blue Day, Barney's Number Friends, and my magnets (and possibly Mario games, if L being green like Luigi's clothes is any indication, even though M, W, and Γ don't match Mario, Wario or Waluigi), a lot of the colors don't match any of the apparent "sources" of my synesthesia. Has anyone else experienced this?
2) Is it normal to have grapheme→color synesthesia, yet still not be exceptionally fast at math?
I'm good at it, yes - in fact, I did so well on an AP Calculus exam that I get to take Calculus III in my first semester of college - but I'm not fast at math. If someone asks me, "What's the square root of 113?" and I don't have a calculator, I couldn't start reciting "10.630145812734649407999121914929..." just then. First, I'd have to manually figure out that the square numbers before and after 113 are 100 and 121, which means that it's between 10 and 11 (so the integer part is 10), which takes about 10 seconds to figure out. Once I tell them that, I try to figure out the next digit. 105² = 10500 + 525 = 11025, so 10.5² = 110.25 (too low); 107² = 10700 + 749 = 11449, so 10.7² = 114.49 (too high); 106² = 11236 (at least by now I noticed a pattern to the squares of numbers between 100 and 109 so I can skip the adding step), so 10.6² = 112.36 (too low).
So, despite my synesthesia, it takes me about 6 minutes just to manually figure out that the square root of 113 is between 10.6 and 10.7. (Just for the record, I didn't put in the calculator answer above until after I'd already manually gotten this far.)
3) Is it common to have synesthesia with varying degrees of vividness, such as the grapheme→personality synesthesia I describe above?
Answers would be appreciated, and since I'm infamous for not making sense, I apologize if this doesn't make sense either.
- Grapheme→color synesthesia
- What I'm currently calling "song→color synesthesia". That is, different songs have different color schemes, but with the exception of video game music and (to a lesser extent) songs with colors in the titles, the colors seem arbitrary; while any given song consistently has the same palette, I haven't found a pattern between the palette and the tones, instruments, tempo, or in some cases, even the title of a song. (Clannad's "I See Red" actually has a gray palette with some green and light blue mixed in!)
- Grapheme→personality synesthesia with highly varied degrees of vividness. The only grapheme that has even some specifics in its physical appearance is 8, which reminds me of a young girl with blonde hair that wears pink. (Oddly, even though this is the only semi-specific physical appearance that a grapheme reminds me of, it isn't based on anyone in particular. Even more odd is that neither the hair or clothing match 8's grapheme→color synesthesia color, which is orange.) Only three other graphemes even have personalities or vague physical appearances: 3 and 7 are jokers, and 9 is like a beautiful woman. (Another strange thing - I often associate anyone with a "beautiful woman"-esque personality with my #1 celebrity crush, Enya, yet 9 still doesn't "look like" Enya.) Some of the other graphemes (including letters now) only have genders, while others don't even have that.
- VERY limited music→taste synesthesia. So far, there is only one time that I've had this. See, ketchup-flavored potato chips were once available in the United States, but sadly, they aren't anymore; but in the time that they were, the Hightail Falls Galaxy music from Super Mario Galaxy 2 tasted like them (after I'd tried them, of course). Unless putting actual ketchup on any other flavor of chips does the same thing to that music (I have yet to attempt it), that was probably the only time I'll ever have music→taste synesthesia.
A few questions:
1) Until I read Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet, I didn't know I had any of these. But this isn't the usual "synesthete's associations were always as vivid as they are today, but at first they thought everyone perceived the same thing" scenario. Rather, before then I hardly even noticed that letters and numbers seemed to naturally have colors in my mind, and when I did, it was usually just based on the letter and number magnets I used to play with and/or Barney's Number Friends (which, in my childhood, was probably my favorite book).
After I read some of Born on a Blue Day (I still have yet to read all of it), I started noticing that, indeed, I had grapheme→color synesthesia, but it was still pretty vague - it took me a long time to decide that C was blue (and even that wasn't quite accurate, as now it seems more like indigo) and that B was orange (same thing - now, it's more of a reddish-orange), but since C didn't match my letter magnets (because, if I remember correctly, the magnet C's were yellow), I knew I had to have grapheme→color synesthesia. I still didn't notice my grapheme→personality synesthesia until much later when I randomly thought about Daniel's again, nor did I notice my song→color synesthesia until I saw someone mention it on some forum/blog I don't remember the name of.
It wasn't until I posted to autism about this much later that I tried to make a complete list of my perceived colors for graphemes, and there were still some that weren't clear enough, so I had to guess. Some of the once ones (stupid typos) I guessed turned out to be wrong later on - for instance, I guessed that 8 was pink (based on Barney's Number Friends), but later on, looking at an 8, I realized that it was actually easier to imagine it as orange than as pink. Even now, most of the graphemes that I perceive as green (F, J, L, T, V, Y, and 7; the last 3 are the exceptions) seem to change shades every now and then, making it difficult to remember new words beginning with F, J, L, or T. Then again, C and N used to keep switching colors in the same way but finally settled on C as indigo and N as blue, so there's hope.
The point is, even though my grapheme→color synesthesia seems to have been given to me by Born on a Blue Day, Barney's Number Friends, and my magnets (and possibly Mario games, if L being green like Luigi's clothes is any indication, even though M, W, and Γ don't match Mario, Wario or Waluigi), a lot of the colors don't match any of the apparent "sources" of my synesthesia. Has anyone else experienced this?
2) Is it normal to have grapheme→color synesthesia, yet still not be exceptionally fast at math?
I'm good at it, yes - in fact, I did so well on an AP Calculus exam that I get to take Calculus III in my first semester of college - but I'm not fast at math. If someone asks me, "What's the square root of 113?" and I don't have a calculator, I couldn't start reciting "10.630145812734649407999121914929..." just then. First, I'd have to manually figure out that the square numbers before and after 113 are 100 and 121, which means that it's between 10 and 11 (so the integer part is 10), which takes about 10 seconds to figure out. Once I tell them that, I try to figure out the next digit. 105² = 10500 + 525 = 11025, so 10.5² = 110.25 (too low); 107² = 10700 + 749 = 11449, so 10.7² = 114.49 (too high); 106² = 11236 (at least by now I noticed a pattern to the squares of numbers between 100 and 109 so I can skip the adding step), so 10.6² = 112.36 (too low).
So, despite my synesthesia, it takes me about 6 minutes just to manually figure out that the square root of 113 is between 10.6 and 10.7. (Just for the record, I didn't put in the calculator answer above until after I'd already manually gotten this far.)
3) Is it common to have synesthesia with varying degrees of vividness, such as the grapheme→personality synesthesia I describe above?
Answers would be appreciated, and since I'm infamous for not making sense, I apologize if this doesn't make sense either.