How common is synesthesia?

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On the page numbers and letters are black and white, but they each have an associated color. Numbers also have gender, but it gets a little confusing. For the most part, numbers are male, except for 8 which is always female and six which can go either way. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rule. Numbers, oddly enough, remind me of facial features. When I was very young I developed an obsession with route marker signs and these signs all had personalities and genders and I would amuse myself on very long trips by inventing stories about them and all their relationships. There were certain ones that were my favorites.

Needless to say I never confessed any of this to to anyone, because I was always in hot water about other things, particularly my horse obsession which alternated between being barely tolerated on one hand, and something to be eradicated at all costs on the other. Had my family realized that these long trips was actually feeding my addiction to this fantasy world, I am sure they would have taken drastic action against that as well. So it basically remained my secret escape.

I associate certain colours with numbers,days,
letters and countries.
I only discovered 2 years ago that it was the condition called Synaesthesia and then
the following year I discovered Asperger's.
Typical,you wait 46 years for an explanation
of your life and 2 explanations come along
in quick succesion !

I see numbers as having colours and also genders and personalities to some degree. I also really dislike some numbers for some reason: 2 and 4 especially.

1 = grey-white. Male.
2 = green-yellow. Male.
3 = crimson Male.
4 = pale blue. Female
5 = scarlet. Male
6 = yellow. Female
7 = green. Female
8 = deep blue. Male
9 = purple. Female

Sometimes, the numbers contrast with eachother or start to blend in if they are beside eachother e.g. '19' seems pale pink.

This might be a little off the topic, but I am wondering if this is how certain languages (like French) became gendered. A coworker and I were discussing synesthesia one day and she confessed that she thinks of paired objects as being male and female (for example, salt and pepper). Could there be a link between gendered languages and populations with a high percentage of Aspergers? And might there have been languages that were color-based? For example, the phrase "blue language" to describe swearing. Are we seeing a remnant of a time when certain words were experienced as being literally blue, and other words other colors?

I am not technically synaesthetic, however I do have more traits I think than average of the population that isn't synaesthetic. But I don't have any sensations which are especially strong and automatic. For me it a blurredness between automatic and just associated.

For me:

1) I find I name 3-dimensional shapes (like furniture) as "odd" or "even". I can tell you immediately if you point to a particular piece of furniture or a figure or something as to whether it is "odd" or "even". I don't exactly know what this means, not even to me. But generally, "evens" make me particularly uncomfortable, so my entire home environment must be "odd". (So I guess this is some slight cross-wiring between broad number categories and objects.)

2) I also have a general unease with even numbers.

3) Peoples' personalities I frequently describe as "soft" versus "hard" or "warm" versus "cold". Nothing as strange as the above example. But I find it very easy to say whether a personal is any one of these and find it very difficult to use any other descriptors. It's almost like these get in the way.

4) I also get feelings of geometric forms from certain things. For instance, some people I could very well describe as a line. I don't know why, they just are lines. A dark black line.

So any synaesthetic traits I do have tend to focus on numbers with objects, numbers and emotion, and tactile/temperature sensations with people (and sometimes geometric shapes). I definitely don't consider people as numbers though, so there's no crossover.

I don't consider myself synaesthetic though, not in the classic sense. Borderline at most. But I do consider my whole numbers thing especially strange since I don't have a particular interest in numbers (not like some people here), so I find it curious that it is the focus of some of this synaesthetic stuff. But then, I guess in synaesthesia people don't pick and choose their associations.

Question: Does anyone here with synaesthesia have an interest in the subject of one of your cross senses, like numbers?

It's impossible for ten people of those who answered (29) to have this condition. It is very rare. I think some people just want to be included with the amazing savant we know as "Brain Man."

Last edited by Microban on 03 Apr 2008, 8:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think I have it, but I do associate numbers, days of the week, and months with colors, and sometimes when I watch the Food channel I can actually smell what the people are cooking.

I've not read the article yet to judge its methodology, but as I understand it these researchers found a rate as high as 1 in 23:

Simner, J.; C. Mulvenna & N. Sagiv et al. (2006). Synaesthesia: The prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences. Perception, 8(35), 1024-1033.

And there's a lot of auties who profess to have synaesthesia. There's some common underlying denominator I'd imagine.

The main reason it was thought to be rare was because it's been so little studied and because it tends not to cause the synaesthete discomfort, they frequently don't tell other people, especially not a researcher. So they have slipped under the eye of scrutiny because they just don't bring much attention to themselves.

As others in this thread have said, for a long time they didn't know it was unusual.

I'm Grapheme-color Synesthetic. My number 3 is bright yellow. All the numbers and letters have their own colour although some do share the same colour with other letters and numbers. And within a word or number, depending on the brightness/solidness of the letters, the letters that aren't so bright/solid have been known to absorb a bit of the nearby colours, so that they lose their individualness and become one with the entire word (or number). Like the word 'little' is all pink (for me) except for the green 'e' at the end. Instead of me seeing the word as 'pink, white, brown, brown, pink, green'.

Some words, contrary to the colours within will have its own set colour. For example Friday is all white, despite the starting letter 'f' being light brown. And Tuesday is pink, despite there being no colour pink in any of the letters.

I also have that other kind of Synesthesia (I'm pretty sure this is Synethesia) where one sense registers something but another sense registers it also when logically it shouldn't. For example. Sometimes when I smell something, not only will I smell the smell but I can also feel it on my chin - like something is brushing by it when there is nothing there. Sometimes smell can also produce in my mind's eye, a sense of colour. Like roast meat produces an essence of colour around me like a misty cloud with a brown tint and some flowers or a fresh spring rain produce an essence cloud of yellow, pinky-purple or, as with the rain, blue, green and white.

I have heard of cases where people have seen colour, or seen a scene like a landscape, when they tasted something.

Also when I hear a sound I not only hear it with my ears, but I can see it displayed in my minds eye with colour - depending on the pitch and tone of the sound. Almost like I can actually see sound waves in my mind's eye. So when I remember sounds I usually have to remember first what colour it was, then I can remember what the sound was like and describe it. When I listen to music I can be very entertained by watching the colour dance in my mind to the music. It can also be very distracting when I need to focus, and my mind's eye is displaying dancing colours.

Actually it is much like the 'Windows Media' visuals.

AA

In general, I only post in threads about topics/problems that concern me. If there are other posters here who follow the same principle, of course the statistics will be skewed.

1 / 23 sounds reasonable. My sister and one friend also have it, other people didn't know what I was talking about. I have synaesthesia for numbers, days and months.

3 is beige

I did my senior capstone project on Olivier Messiaen, a French composer who heard modes in color (he'd even write them into the score).

Anyway, I did a lot of research on synaesthesia in the process and here are some points I picked up:

1. It tends to run in families.
2. It tends to be more common in children; perhaps because as children grow older, their imaginations become stiffer or less willing to believe in things not "normal."
3. It's more common in females.
4. For those of us with the grapheme-color synaesthesia, the numbers 0 and 1, and the letters O and I are almost always either black or white. Another name for this is what's called "Chromaesthesia."
5. Certain stimuli always create the same reaction. As in, they've tested synaesthetes like 10 years apart on what colors people see, and the colors are almost always exactly the same, with a few shade variations here and there.
6. Some people see numbers in color; some people mentally order events in particular shapes/configurations; some people taste shapes; some people hear music in color; some people smell something and they taste something or vice versa . . . the combinations are seemingly endless.
7. They also believe that synaesthetic reactions are more common in people on the spectrum though.

I have grapheme-color synaesthesia and wonder what the chances are of two people having the same color assosiations for numbers 0-9.

My numbers:
0 - white, 1 - black, 2 - blue, 3 - red, 4 - brown, 5 - purple/magenta/plum, 6 - green, 7 - yellow, 8 - white, 9 - green

My letters:
A - blue, B - red, C - cream or white, D - green, E - charcoal, F - tan/brown, G - gray, H - brown, I - black, J - purple, K - tan, L - lavender or light purple, M and N are both brownish, O - white, P - pink, Q - light green (lima bean color), R - reddish brown, S - white/silver, T - black, U - a tannish pink, V - green, W - dark chocolate, X - orange, Y - yellow, Z - yellow. Some colors are more firmly associated with certain letters than others.

Probably greater than 10^10, since some papers I was reading say that certain numbers are more likely to elicit certain colors.

Fascinating!