How common is synesthesia?

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I have both of these. I didn't even know it wasn't normal until I found these articles.

Ordinal Linguistic Personification

Grapheme-Color synesthesia

I also just noticed the other day that on the back of 'Born On a Blue Day', by Daniel Tammet, someone says that the odds of having both autism and synesthesia is about 1 in 10,000. I find that extremely hard to believe.

Does anyone here have synesthesia, or anything like it? Please tell me I'm not the only person who thinks the number 3 is male, orange, and up to no good.

No, not me.

It would also be interesting to see if there's a connection between being a 'visual' person and having this. I've always known the genders of letters and numbers (4, 6, 9, H, K, R, and possibly Y, are all female. The rest are male), but I didn't think as much about color because there are always colors in my head, and I don't always think about patterns. I'm not going to think to myself, "Hey, the number 24 is really yellowish green" any more than I'm going to point to an unripe lime and say the same thing.

When you write letters or numbers, do you copy mental images, or do you go through a specific process to form each letter/number?

I use images.

I've never really thought about it. I just kind of start writing, and there they are. It did always annoy me when my mom would tell me what the 'right' way to write a number or letter was. I always

I have grapheme-colour synesthesia. There was an extensive thread about it here.

You're right, actually. Several.

Charles M. Schulz has been mentioned here as a possible Aspie, and this cartoon makes me wonder whether he suffered from ordinal linguistic personification:

Awesome. I don't remember that one. When I first found out about OLP, though, I instantly thought of 5.
He has sisters whose names are 3 and 4, or something, and Charlie Brown is like, "Those are nice feminine names. "

I have personification synesthesia. And yes -the number 3 is female, but I usualy see it as yellow or a warmer colour. Anyway...

Numbers from 1-12 or so have personalities as do basic colours and a few letters.

Also, one time I was putting on my shoes and smelt scented candles, and another time I was taking down a board note and I tasted chocolate cake. It was the best board note in the world. ^^

the number 5 has been blue for as long i can remember. but it's also metallic and cold, and seems to sound like small pieces of ice clinking against one another in the inter-tidal zone.
the number 8 does not have a color attached to it, but it seems heavy and almost lethargic to me.
of course it's possible that i learned these associations at some point... colored magnets?

The only number I associate with some colour is "2", which is blue. Other than that, I have no form of synesthesia.

its supposed to be more common in families with ASD.
there's a lot of autism and aspergers in family,but sister is only one with synesthwhatsit.

I read on Wikipedia (an unreliable source) that about 1 in 25 people have synesthesia. This approximately correlates with rates of reported synesthesia in people with whom I have spoken about it.

In elementary school, I used to argue with several other children about what colors different numbers and letters were. Synesthesia seemed common in this class of six-year-old girls who did well on standardized tests (required for admission to the school).

As an adult, I have randomly asked people if they associate numbers or letters or sounds with colors, textures, etc. Most react as though one would have to be crazy to even think of such a thing, so synesthesia must not be that common in adults.

I wonder if synesthesia-like experiences are common in children because young children are often presented with numbers and alphabets in different colors, probably to facilitate learning through association.

Funny, I've always thought that the number 8 has sort of a 'rising' or progressing quality, like a helium balloon or a mighty ship. 5 has a similar quality, but 8 seems to be rising against its will, and more vertically, while 5 just sort of looks ahead and moves more horizontally.

I ask people about it all the time. Usually they either make something up, tell me something like, "whatever color you want it to be", or something witty like "depends on your diet" (in response to "what color is the number two" or "the letter P").

i don't associate things with color, normally... but i do associate numbers, letters, colors, time, etc. to gender. for example:

numbers that are female:
1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, etc...
numbers that are male:
2, 4, 5, 8, 10, etc...

letters that are female:
a, f, h, i, k, l, m, p, r, t, u, v, w, y
letters that are male:
b, c, d, e, g, j, n, o, q, s, x, z

colors that are female:
red, yellow, orange, purple, white etc.
colors that are male:
blue, green, black etc.

time that is female:
february, march, april, may, august, monday, tuesday, thursday, month, minute, etc.
time that is male:
january, june, july, september, october, november, december, sunday, wednesday, friday, saturday, year, week, day, second, etc.

an odd note, is that most of the words that are a certain gender start with the letter of that gender... with some exceptions, like orange, wednesday, year, and week... but the gender of those are a bit ambiguous to begin with... like Mana-sama..

but, now that i think of it, i can easily picture a color for a number... i can see 1 as white, 2 as yellow, 3 as orange, 4 as dark blue, 5 as more of a cyan, 6 as purple, 7 as like.. transparent.. O-o 8 as black, 9 as green, 10... 10 is ambiguous to me. maybe rainbow..