Re: CHAT: Synesthesia

On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, 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.
Really?  Hmm.  Now *that* is interesting.  I wonder if this is more common
now then it was a few years ago (lack of mental images), and if so, if
it's related to the television, and if so, if that explains the wanning
lack of popularity of poetry . . . sorry, I'm just thinking aloud.

As a child, when learning 'rithmatic (I grew up on a farm) I remember
getting a sense, a personality, of each number.  Eight, for instance, was
an obese kind of dour older man.  Three was a young boy.  Two a young
girl.  One was a librarian-type person, sometimes male, sometimes female.
Five wore a leather jacket and smoked.  Four wore a tie and a suit.  Six
was a criminal.  Seven was self-righteous.  Nine was unapproachable and
superior.  Zero was jolly and outrageous.  I never considered that
Synesthesia, though.  I mentioned it to some of my co-workers some time
ago, and they thought it was very odd -- especially when I started saying
"oh, Matt's a five, you're a three" and so on.  (incidently, it doesn't
stop at nine, but continues up to at least twenty -- after that, I get
images but I'm not remembering them from childhood, I think)

I have experienced bona-fide Synesthesia once while driving my car,
without the use of drugs.  I pulled into the driveway of my house and
suddenly I began to see the music on the radio in patterns of red and
blue.  It lasted for about three full seconds, then snapped off as quickly
as it had come on.  If I had been on the highway, I might have gotten in a
wreck, because the patterns actually obscured my vision to some extent.