Synesthesia -- Anybody here have it?

[NoisyAstronomer]

I've never experienced that, but I have a friend who does. Letters and numbers have distinct colors in his mind. And words take on the color of the first letter. We had a good time one night finding out what colors our names were associated with.

And no, no LSD. No drugs of any sort with this guy.

 

[buzz lightyear]

I discovered in the 90's that this was a named phenomenon, and that it was (then) considered vary rare. Since sounds have had color associations for me for my entire life--and it seems entirely normal to me--I was delighted to gain this insight. I'd learned not to talk about it, because people didn't understand what I meant, but for example brass instruments are blue or purplish in their tones, and strings are more gold-red spectrum.

Like you, Miss Kitt, I have had a colour, sound association all my life.
But it also had an emotion element to it, so various sounds-colours produced emotions.
So like most children with 'abnormal' abilities I suppressed it as much as possible.

It wasnt until later life that I started to explore this realm and found, that as Rob Lister has pointed out, LSD is the catalyst par excellence.
I have found the ability to see and produce emotions through sound is a remarkable and beautiful way to explore the inner regions of my psyche.

 

[Miss_Kitt]

Just mentally associating things is not synesthesia. True synesthesia is sensory. The latter is rare, but any time I see it mentioned online, I see lots of people chiming in with their own examples of the former as if it were the same thing. The very fact that so many people can give examples of the former demonstrates that it isn't at all unusual. Associating one thing with another in an arbitrarily symbolic way is just a part of how human brains think. Getting signals from one of the body's senses misdirected to where signals from another one belong is not.

Delvo -- The research that I have been doing indicated that there are people who have a literal, physiological "association" that is involuntary, consistent, and lifelong, and that this is considered synesthesia. The people who can't "switch off" the color processing (or texture, or whatever) have the strongest form, but people with milder presentations are not all "just claiming it" when it isn't happening. They have devised some interesting tests to screen out exactly those kind of wannabes.

At the moment, some researchers believe that all humans start out with their sensory responses "cross-wired", and the connections are pruned down over time, thus removing the additional response. In other words, we have all been synesthetes, but some people's brains retain that function into adulthood, while most don't. Another school of thought is that some brains just have connections between areas that most brains don't. In either case, it appears to be a heritable tendency.

This seems to be a rapidly developing field of research, especially at UCSD and in Spain (forgive me, I've forgotten which university there).

 

[Kotatsu]

My ex-girlfriend had it for sounds. She played the oboe (very nicely, if I may say so), which she loved the colour of, but she couldn't stand the clarinet, as the colour was ghastly. Some kind of stingy red, if I recall correctly.

I had never heard about this until I met her the first time. Then it was revealed to me that two of my best friends also had it --- one seeing colours on all numbers (as others have shown in this thread) and one only seeing letters in colours. So of five people in the room, three had synesthesia, and two had never heard of it before...

 

[Miss_Kitt]

Replying to several: I don't know that psychotropics are or aren't a catalyst for this. Back in the Day, I definitely once watched a ceiling display the sound of a RUSH album for and hour and a half after nobody told me the brownies were "magic" until after I'd eaten TWO...but I have not done any studies, even informally on the subject. (The one nice thing was that lightshow kept my mind off how awful my stomach felt.)

One of the hallmarks of this phenomenon is that it is consistent, that is, if 3 is red for you when you're a kid, it's always red for you. Furthermore, if you're looking at a black-and-white screen with symbols on it and one of them is a "3", fMRI will show the area of the brain that assesses color is firing. Also, people with this kind of synesthesia can pick out differing characters in a random screenful more quickly than other folks if the odd symbols are ones they "see" as a bright color like red or yellow.

Dagny -- What color is "Dagny" for you? Just curious, but I assume since you took it for your screen name, you like it.

Current research suggests the occurance of some form of synesthesia may be as common as one in a thousand, or even--this is the lowest I've seen, and I don't know what their threshhold was--one in 200. It's not often reported without direct questioning, because it is perfectly normal to the person who has it.

What I find interesting is that there have been so many positive responses, though of course this is a self-selecting group. I know based on my own experience, I just didn't mention it because I learned young that it wasn't productive. (In fact, I remember having my first husband tell me, "No, you don't!" when I told him about it.)

 

[Dagny]

Miss Kitt - Dagny is a blackish color with dark red undertones – if that makes any sense. A lot of my colors are sort of difficult to describe in a coherent manner. I do find the color of Dagny far more appealing than yellow which is by far the most offensive of all colors.

 

[buzz lightyear]

Replying to several: I don't know that psychotropics are or aren't a catalyst for this. Back in the Day, I definitely once watched a ceiling display the sound of a RUSH album for and hour and a half after nobody told me the brownies were "magic" until after I'd eaten TWO...but I have not done any studies, even informally on the subject. (The one nice thing was that lightshow kept my mind off how awful my stomach felt.)

)

Your "cookies" were probably mushroom (psilocybin) laced. An unpredictable, and as you experienced unpleasant venture into psychotropics.
I am pleased that you used the term psychotropics, and not hallucinogens.

My experience with synthetic psychotropics has been to enable me to create acoustic harmonic vortices. This involves chanting, with my eyes closed for a number of hours in a harmonic chamber.
After about an hour of this, the visual cortex receives the sound as images and the various notes become colours that are stacked in a very similar manner to this graph.

After about 3 hours the vortex becomes self sustaining and it is just a matter of watching which colour starts to fade, and sing the note of the corresponding colour to keep the mass spinning.

The sound produced is divine.