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An interesting link: Why some see colours in numbers

Synaesthesia is "an extraordinary condition in which the five senses intermingle". It's like living inside an acid trip: numbers have colours, colours sound like music, words have taste.

I'm not fully synaesthetic, but I experience some of this. I see words and concepts in colour; Monday is pale blue, Thursday brown. The number five is blue too. There are words that fill my mouth with a disgusting taste when I say them, others taste like heaven (curiously, this happens to me more in Spanish, my mother tongue). It doesn't happen always, or with everything, but sometimes I can spend a whole day mentally rolling a word around in my tongue, enjoying the associations, until my brain gets sick of it. And sometimes I feel so overwhelmed by a sensory overload, reading poetry, looking at art or a landscape, or listening to music.

It's cool... but it also hinders my understanding of maths, since numbers are for me so loaded with associations (I tend to see letters instead of numbers, as well as colours and words) that it's very hard for me to grasp their abstract value.

Has anyone ever experienced this kind of thing?

Hmmm maybe not like you have it Ber but maybe slightly similar. i see days as a kind of board game one stretched the other round and fat.

i see music ( litterally see) in colours and shapes but maybe this is normal

And like you can i have a facination for one word the entire day repeating it to myself over and over again. Usually i have a word that makes me feel happy and other times i feel nothing at all.

My math problem is different though. it's like a shadowy spot in my brain. i see the numbers on paper but i just can't see numbers in my head. i simply can't ,like trying to add some prices, i need someone to do it for me or use fingers so i can see the numbers because in my head i see only a black spot. Very weird but i can't help it. i also sometimes have trouble just remembering which number gets after which. like 3 +4 i always say 8 when i know it's suppose to be 7. i simply forget and can't see 7 is still between 6 and 8.

so i am not stupid but simply number blind.

This is so interesting!

My son had a horrible time with an untreated sight disorder (I TRIED to treat it, THOUGHT it was treated, and it WASN'T treated at all... I still think I may have to hurt someone, someday) and tends to "hear" things he should be "seeing".


He is a horrible reader, but not a bad speller. I asked him one time how he imagined the word... in my mind, I actually "see" the written word, and am actually a much better speller if I can write it down. He said he "heard" the letters as musical notes, and the words themselves formed a musical phrase.

I was, and am, completely fascinated by that answer. The brain is a wonderful place, isn't it?

I've experienced something similar.. I also have colours for days of the week (yep, thursday is brown!). But I don't associate numbers with colours, which probably helps me find maths easier.

When I'm playing a piece I know well from memory on the piano, I feel as if I'm caressing a series of soft shapes that change as the notes do.

I associate the musical scale with colors. When I was young, I composed in colors, not knowing how to read music.
A = yellow
B = pink (I hate the color and the key)
C = red
D = brown
E = grey green
F = light blue
G = white

Out of pure curiosity laureanna, how'd you see the sharps and flats? As shades or different colors?

I ask because I find the whole phenomenon beautiful and fascinating. I myself, however, am very mainstream in the way I sense things.

I see music in colors and moving shapes, particularly when I am trying to learn a piece of music by ear, but that's my only personal experience with what you're describing.

I have a friend, though, who hears what she sees. A firefly, for example, has a particular sound when it flashes. People's faces have unique sounds. Her brother and father have the same condition, and she and her brother would play a game in which one would make the noise associated with a mutual acquaintance's face, and the other could tell who it was. So apparently they were hearing the SAME sounds for similar visual cues.

It's all quite fascinating.

Jeez. I'm so DULL. What an interesting thread!

I don't have colours for days or numbers, I see people's faces with my eyes.........

But I love patterns. I love playing with the number 9 as I drive along and if it's a long drive I get into the number 6, which takes a longer time to establish its pattern.

Still, very commonplace. You guys are fascinating.

You can also achieve this effect through the ingestion of certain psychoactive substances, but I will not divulge which ones for fear of corrupting young minds.

Berhael wrote:

It's like living inside an acid trip

I read an interesting article the other week about a woman who could hear, taste, and see music. Let me see if I can dig it up...

Long URL

Apparently, there is some degree of consistency in which colors people associate with which notes. And intervals that sound bad look and taste bad as well. I also wonder how important this condition might be to appreciating poetry and abstract art. Maybe I'm exactly right when I say I just don't get it.

I alas also lack this linking function in my brain, but I had read the articles that Dave_LF linked to and found it just fascinating.

I do have a very good ability to integrate, however, I do not see colors or sense smells, but I see patterns, if this makes any sense. Music, language, mathematics, spatial observations all become inter-related. So, while I do not see Thursday as a color, I see it as a sort of circular calendar, and numbers sort of factor into it as a sideline.

Music is more complex, it does evoke visual components, but they are unique to the music at hand, sort of what it evokes into me. Language is the same, but I cannot claim that one thing will be black, another green, or that type of association.

For me, the whole world is sort of patterns - I do not know if this is the same thing at all, but, that is how I view it. Which also probably enters into my whole MBTI outlook on life, in that for me there are so few absolutes, just many many shades of gray (or colors, for those of you who CAN see the world in the way!!) I wish I saw the colors!

Riverthalos - the sharps and flats are variations on the main color, with a preference for flats. E flat is lighter and yellower green as associated with E, not brighter brown, as a D sharp. Minor keys are more muted and gray.

As for numbers, 4 is blue. No other number particularly inspires a color.

Wow, this is really interesting. Now I have to ask myself how many of my students I have abused in the past!! The basic economics courses are all required, and if some of those students were 'hearing' the equations or seeing them as colors ... they probably couldn't make any sense at all out of my lectures.

Watcher said, "For me, the whole world is sort of patterns - I do not know if this is the same thing at all, but, that is how I view it."

Yes, I also see the world as patterns ... but if I had to articulate to myself what kind of pattern it is, I would say that it's a math pattern. A geometric pattern of some sort, with things nested inside of one another, or rotated so that they're complementary. I hear music this way, and I look at art this way too.

Last term I was trying to explain to my grad students how a recursive equation was being expanded ... and it was so clear to me ... like looking at a Chinese box with an obvious key, but I couldn't find words to explain it. Well, I was trying to make them see the key without having to write a whole bunch of expanded equations on the board, but I realized finally that they needed to see it written out ... it was a very odd experience for me, being able to see the pattern but not being able to find the right words to describe it.

Because I'm not primarily a visual person, I never thought much about how others "see" art ... I just figured they saw more than I do because they are more aware of what there is to see. It never occurred to me that they actually experience what they see differently - not just more, but different as well.

I guess the people that fascinate me the most are the ones who see very deep into mathematical relationships. Not just idiot savants but these guys that can look at something like pi and just know what equation will work out all the decimal points. Even the stuff that I have to teach ... it amazes me how the people who came up with the equations just saw through to which kinds of operations would yield a sensible answer.

These don't seem to me to be deductive processes - there's some flash of insight involved, and I guess that's true of art and music as well.

Jn

Fascinating! I'm a boring person by comparison.

This reminded me of a sci-fi story I read long ago, of a man who went through some experimental hyper-space travel with the result that his hearing and seeing got switched around. In other words that character heard sights and saw sounds. The story dealt with how he learned to live with that new perception of the word. It was a beautiful piece, describing his hearing an old oak as a cello melody and seeing his beloved's voice in flashes of brilliant colors.

My "seeing" music doesn't involve specific colors for specific notes. It's more generalized. Two instrumental pieces might use the same notes in different order and one might be a red spiral while the other is dark and angular. It seems more linked to the overall feeling.

Perhaps this is a different phenomenon altogether since I seem to be able to switch it on or off as needed -- possibly more linked to pattern-seeing and using associations to remember things.

My friend who hears what she sees finds visual clutter or movement terribly distracting.

Wow... that's fascinating.
I guess there are as many different kinds of synaesthesia as people, seeing as it's related with the way the synapses are connected to each other, and knowing just how many combinations are possible...
I'm sure that most great artists, poets, musicians etc. had at least a degree of synaesthesia.

Wow. This is COOL.

I'd love to have this condition!!!

I don't think in colours or sounds even though I am a very imaginative person.

I am sure I am number-dyslexic, if such a thing exists. Maths makes no sense to me. It never has. I did well in school but was a total total dunce at maths. IT JUST MADE NO SENSE. No sense at all.

I can't read music either - even though I sing with my church's music group - and wonder if this is related to my number-dyslexia.

I do think in 'shapes'. The days of the week have shapes ... for example, the weekend feels like a valley. Sunday night is the deepest part of the valley, before the climb up to the mountain which is Monday.

They don't have colours though. Or tastes. I wish they did!

This is mind-boggling! I just can't relate it to anything in my experience. The only sensory anomaly that I have is an inability to listen to a song on the radio and a person talking at the same time. My mind just can't process music and speech at the same time, and I seem to choose music every time. I literally have to turn off the music, to listen to what a person is saying to me.

The concept of synaesthesia is just world wobbling to me. It never occurred to me that such a thing is possible. Thanks for sharing!