Re: CHAT: Synesthesia

On 9 Dec, Nik Taylor wrote:

>Melissa Phong wrote:
>> I'm a bit confused about what synesthesia is exactly.  All words conjour
up
>> colors in my head and I see things like Nicole describes. For instance,
the
>> alphabet looks rather like piano keys and August is sort of a muted
yellow.
>> But to me, that's quite different from having synesthesia and tasting
colors,
>> etc. I guess I just assumed that everybody sees words as colors and
different
>> designs. Is that not true?
>
>Not true at all.  I get no visual connotations from different words,
>even a word like "red" doesn't give me any image unless I actually
>conciously *think* about the color red.
>
    Reminds me of the study of reaction times in reading,
where the subject had to read words that were flashed
on a screen. Some words were in black or colored  inks, but the
color words (red, blue, green, etc.) were either in black,
their own color ("red" in red ink) or another color
("red" in, say, blue ink). IIRC, people required more time to
respond to color terms in other colored ink. (with neutral words
it made no difference.) I wonder how someone with synesthesia
would do on this experiment.
    BTW, although I don't consider myself as having synesthesia
as such, musical compositions (as a whole, not notes or chords)
often impress me as having color --- but in my case it's always
a combination of two colors! For example: Tchaikovski's  5th
symphony is blue-gold. His 6th symphony is silver-dark green.
Dvorak's New World symphony is gray-yellow. Interestingly,
it doesn't go the other way: colors have never suggested music to me.

Dan Sulani


--------------------------------------------------------------------
likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.