Light indigo, slightly-yellow orange, sea green, sea green, somewhat more yellow orange (i.e. hello)

[matt1993]

Hi all! I'm new here. My synesthesia types, for anyone curious:

- Grapheme→color synesthesia

- What I'm currently calling "song→color synesthesia".

Comments

[matt1993]

In "Mango Shaped Space", a YA novel, the character with grapheme-->color synesthesia has trouble with math because the numbers are written in white chalk or gray pencil, rather than their appropriate colors. It confuses her.

I know that people with grapheme→color synesthesia have a harder time with math equations that are written in a single color, but still, I'm not even particularly fast if someone verbally gives me a math problem and I imagine the numbers in my mind in their proper colors.

It seems as though the colors helped me memorize math (e.g., times tables, the first few digits of some irrational constants like pi and the square root of 2...), but they don't help much with doing it because I still haven't memorized the same things with the colors themselves.

For instance, "violet × orange = green, cerulean" probably subconsciously helped me in 3rd grade (or maybe before then) to memorize 9 × 8 = 72 (even though I didn't know about synesthesia at the time), but if I just randomly pick two colors to "multiply" like that and they happen to be violet and orange, I don't immediately think "green, cerulean" and convert that to 72. Instead, I have to convert violet and orange to 9 and 8 and then multiply those to get 72.

That gave me an idea, though - I should write a program that gives me simple math problems to solve, but with all the digits either in their proper colors or replaced with squares or circles of those colors (I'm not sure which would help the most), in order to help make me faster (not better) at math. Thanks for accidentally giving me an idea! :D

Some people with synesthesia constantly experience it, while others only have it to varying degress. I have sound-->color/texture syn that tends to overlap a bit with grapheme. Certain words have colors or textures due to how they sound and sometimes I see them when I look at words, but it's not as vivid.

I knew that some synesthetes have varying degrees of synesthesia - for instance, some see vowels in much brighter colors than those of consonants - but I was wondering if there was anyone else who, for a single type of synesthesia, has this variation as drastic as I do, since I perceive 8 as having a gender, age group, hair color, and outfit color yet 0, 1, and about half of the alphabet don't even have genders.