Sunday, December 6, 2009

Grapheme Synesthesia

For the longest time I can remember I have associated single digit numbers with colors. I don't know why this happened, but the colors for the numbers 0 through 9 have never changed since my childhood.

Imagine my surprise when a friend told me there was a name for it. Synesthesia, he said. Wow. There's a word for everything, even things that seem to be nonsense-nobody-else-experiences these things but me stuff.

So for the world to see...or at least a handful of followers, I've attached the image that I created following my personal synesthetic number-color arrangement.

0= White
1= Black
2= Red
3= Orange
4= Green
5= Yellow
6= Red -or- sometimes Maroon
7= Cobalt Blue -to- Violet
8= Caramel Brown (don't ask me why, but it is a certain hue of brown I see)
9= Maroon (the same as 6 which makes sense to me)


I also included certain colors which appear in my mind to alternate from time to time.
The most solid or consistent associations are 0, 1, 3, 4, 5, 8
My remaining wishy-washy color numbers are  6, 7, 9

Who else does this? Jiggins?

Wiki quote: definition for this type of synesthesia follows. See full link here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

Grapheme → color synesthesia

In one of the most common forms of synesthesia, grapheme → color synesthesia, individual letters of the alphabet and numbers (collectively referred to as graphemes), are "shaded" or "tinged" with a color. While different individuals usually do not report the same colors for all letters and numbers, studies with large numbers of synesthetes find some commonalities across letters (e.g., A is likely to be red).[19][21]
As a child, Pat Duffy told her Dad, "I realized that to make an R all I had to do was first write a P and draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line." Another grapheme synesthete says, "When I read, about five words around the exact one I'm reading are in color. It's also the only way I can spell. In elementary school I remember knowing how to spell the word 'priority' [with an "i" rather than an "e"] because ... an 'e' was out of place in that word because e's were yellow and didn't fit."[26]
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