You May Have Synesthesia, but You Don’t Know It
I first heard about synesthesia when I was a child and it sounded amazing. People can hear colors! Watch the music! What a fantastic psychedelic world they must see. It took another 20 years before I realized that I also have synesthesia. I just didn’t understand, because it wasn’t that interesting.
I find synesthetes with similar backgrounds all the time. Earlier this week, author Caroline Moss tweeted about how she thinks of the days of the week as having a shape , with matching colors for each day. “I don’t think I have synesthesia,” she said in her next tweet. In fact, this is synesthesia.
Synesthesia is not a flashy hallucination. I experience it more as an association. If you don’t have synesthesia, imagine it this way: Let’s say in your elementary school there was a kid named Mark who was kind of a jerk and you didn’t like his face. You are now about to add the child to your family, and your partner suggests that you name the child Mark. “No way,” you say. “I can’t remember the name ‘Mark’ without imagining this idiot from my childhood.”
It’s the same with my synesthesia. When I see the letter “A” it is not really red, but I can’t help but think about red. If I schedule an appointment for Tuesday, my brain automatically represents the week as a circle with a blue sector at about 5 o’clock, and this is where our meeting will be.
Synesthesia may not even be uncommon
Connections between ideas – colors, units of time, letters, numbers, sounds, tastes, personalities – are fairly common. They are considered synesthesia if they become fixed in your mind over time, seemingly for no reason. If you meet a good person named Mark, you will break the old association and start building a new one. This is not synesthesia. But if you asked me ten years ago to tell me what color each letter of the alphabet is, and then tested me again today, my results would be pretty consistent.
We often assume that synesthesia is rare, but some studies, such as this one in 2006 , suggest that it is fairly common: about 4 percent of people had one of the types they tested for, and the most common was color binding to days of the week. Another common type, associating colors with numbers or letters, occurs in 1 percent of people.
Synesthesia seems to develop sometime in childhood; you are not born with it. I asked my son at about six years old: What color is the letter “A”? “Red,” he said without hesitation. Then we talked about the rest of the alphabet; he firmly felt that some letters had colors and some did not. (Same thing here: I really don’t know what color the X is – something dark and dark, I guess – but its neighbor W stands out in royal blue.) My son’s mental alphabet has different colors than mine, but his brain works the same way.
On the contrary, his brother viewed the same matter as a game, assigning a color to the letters and then changing his mind or inventing stories about why that letter was that color. He either does not have this form of synesthesia, or he is young enough not to form his mental models yet.
These are not (only) memories of your childhood
In my experience, people who have synesthesia but are unaware of it tend to think they are imagining a child’s calendar or toy. There is some truth to this: one popular set of toy magnetic letters overlaps with some of the more common letter-color associations of synesthetes . I was playing with the same setup when I was growing up, so when I heard about this opening, I clicked to see the picture, expecting all of these to be familiar colors, but they are not. His A was red, just like mine (did you notice that A is almost always red in books and toys?), But many of the other colors were wrong. Letters B and D should be blue. The letter P should be purple.
I suspect that our brains are imprinting such things as we study our colors and letters, but then we distort these images to match other patterns that our brain notices or outputs. My vision of the months of the year comes directly from a wall calendar with kittens that we had as children – I’m sure of that – but only my first and last few months coincide with their position on this calendar. All spring and summer months have turned into a curved sliding ramp. I guess it made more sense to me somehow.
So I’m curious. Readers, how many of you associate colors or spatial patterns with numbers, letters, days of the week, months of the year, or anything else that has no color or shape of its own? What about other synesthetic associations, such as those that associate concepts, music, or sensations with colors, scents, or personalities? ( Wikipedia lists some of the known types of synesthesia here , if it helps.)
And if your brain does have any of these links, tell us – how long did it take for you to realize that this is considered synesthesia?