Re: Synaesthesia

On Sat, Dec 28, 2002 at 05:59:59AM -0800, Joseph Fatula wrote:
[snip]
> - The letter F is blue, but a particular shade of blue that is hard to
> explain.
For me, F is red or brown.

> - The months of the year quite clearly go from top to bottom,
For me, the months are "laid out" in a zig-zag manner (like a mirror-image
S), with January at the top left, and the rest of the months following it
on the zig-zag manner, and December is bottom-right. And of course, the
January of the next year is attached to the December of the previous year.
Oh yes, and each month is square. (Now of course, this could be totally an
unconscious impression of printed calenders.)

> but the hours of the day do not.  They go from bottom to top (starting
> around sunrise), then curve back to go down to the next day around 8pm.
For me, the hours of the day follow the appearance of the clock hands.

[snip]
> - What color is Wednesday?
Dunno, but the days of a week are laid out in a definite pattern for me.
Sunday is top left, Monday is top left, slightly higher than Sunday
(although it they may be level), and the five weekdays are arranged in a
vertical column on the right, slightly curved outwards, so that wednesday
is in the center, most bulged place. Saturday is directly below Sunday and
to the left of Friday.

And while I'm on that, I sometimes think of the time of the day as a line
passing through each of these "days", with midnight right on the boundary
between two days.

> - These colors, images, and sounds that I am talking about are clearly not
> in front of me like the things that elicit them.  They are instead some sort
> of innate quality that I am aware of, sort of on top of what I'm
> seeing/hearing/smelling.
Yep. Sorta like how I associate 72 with familiarity and intimacy, and 17
with things uniquely mine. Don't ask where these numbers came from; I
"made them up" or "noticed" them in my childhood, although they never had
any direct association with anything.

And talking about colors... I am a hobbyist musician, and I associate
specific colors with specific major/minor scales. For example, A major is
red and flashy, G major is green or blue, jovial and even jocial. D major
is yellowish (cream?), but E major is bright flashy yellow. C major is
boring white, and F major is soft and brown.  B-flat minor is dark and
blue (as opposed to dark blue), though somehow associated with D major.
A-flat major is pink. F minor is dark brown with splotches of black;
whereas B minor is a creamy color.

> - Has a word ever bothered you because it had a meaning that was very clear
> to you by its sound, yet totally different from the meaning it is used as?
I seem to recall isolated instances of that, though it's never bothered me
enough for me to remember what they were.

[snip]
> I'm sure most of you are reading this and wondering what I've been smoking
> today.  (And possibly wondering where you can get some.)
I don't smoke anything, never did, yet all this sounds rather familiar to
me. :-)

[snip]
> walking.  I realized something was going on when I made a comment about the
> "inherent" color of something as opposed to the color it actually has.  And
> if you find that much of your conlanging is in the furtherance of a quest to
> find ought what everything ought to sound like, let me know.
[snip]

I don't really see it as that. I'm not at all concerned with finding out
what things ought to sound like; to me, these auxilliary associations are
just an internal mental aid to me. They are probably totally meaningless
to anyone else but myself. Although, I *have* met someone who also
associates colors with musical scales, and we've had interesting
conversations about what the colors "ought" to be. Of course, it didn't
take very long to realize that we perceived colors differently (colors
convey different connotations to us), and so could never agree on specific
colors for specific scales.

> I'm guessing that if you don't understand any of this you won't see why I
> posted it here.  But for me, this is as linked to language-making as the
> study of phonetics.
I don't know, to me it is more closely linked to mental symbolic
representation than to language itself. Oh BTW, did I ever mention that
English is red or yellow, French is pink/brown, and Ebisedian is yellow
and brown? :-) (And when I say something is color X and color Y, it
doesn't mean they have a 2-color pattern, but that they are simultaneously
both colors. The mind is free to make physically-impossible conceptions,
after all.)


T

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