How common is synesthesia?

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What I think of this synesthesia, it sounds as though the person has creatively synthesized two or more diverse ideas/symbols such as colours/gender with numbers and/or letters. I did the same thing with emotions. I would attribute the letters of the alphabet and numbers with feelings, as if projecting my feelings onto symbols and shapes. for example, I would say the letter 'e' smiled. The number '1' wanted to be alone. In fact, any number wanted to be by itself, but if it was double digit, like 12, the two numbers wanted to be together. I would look for emotions in objects and shapes, and even in prints and patterns, like an emotional gestalt thing. Weird. I never mentioned it to anyone, but when I was an adult I called it symbol/object anthropomorphization. I filed it away under oddities, but resurrected it when i came across this thread.

FYI: If you look at some of these emoticon values sideways when clicked on to the message body, then you can determine the emotion. Try it.

Last edited by sartresue on 06 Apr 2008, 9:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

Could synthesesia be caused by exposure to coloured numbers at an early age? I'm just wondering: if a child learnt to read or count using picture books where one number was always the same colour, maybe they learn to always associate this number with that particular colour? I've often wondered if I sense seven as green because of the colour of the 7-Up bottles...

I doubt it. Some evidence indicates that that it has to do with paired clusters in the brain that have to do with specific task sharing information. This is something that is abnormal neurology so you can't really learn how to do it.

I have ordinal linguistic personification, and personify many inanimate objects in general.

I also have a kind of synesthesia that involves being able to taste emotions or impressions on occasion. It's more common for me when I'm stressed. A certain kind of anxiety tastes like bananas, fear with rage tastes like metallic car tires. There are also images that go with them. The anxiety gives the impression of a canted far away black door in a yellow alley-way. The fear one gives an image of a rusty, industrial setting, with pen and ink qualities. I'm fully aware that these images aren't really there, but it's definitely in the realm of sensation, not imagination. I can imagine the images now, and it's nothing like the experience of seeing them overlayed on reality that comes with the emotions.

Also -- the concept of relating "7" to green because seven up is green, is quite valid. It's conjectured that many of the associations are determined by such things at an early age, but then they are persistent over time. For instance, "7" should always be "green" for a synesthete, even if 7-up changed the color of their bottle.

The question is whether or not a person is experiencing an association (reminder, nudge), or an association that has turned into a sensation (something altogether different).

I can imagine the taste of bananas, but when I get the synesthesia for that kind of anxiety, I'm not imagining it, I'm actually tasting it -- even though I'm not eating bananas.

I know I'm repeating - but I'm really glad I found this place!! I too have synesthesia - in my case it is the days of the week, months of the year, the year of my birth, all "decade" years and leap years that have their own specific colors. I remember trying to explain this to NT's, but all I got was (in the best case) blank looks, and in the worst case derision and bullying. I learned fairly quickly to keep stuff like that to myself, and to quietly study NT"s to see what was acceptable and "normal", or not.

Wikipedia is as unreliable as the cited sources are. If you can cite a source, and make sure it won't get flagged by a bot, and manage to have none of the obsessive wiki-combers notice it, then you can get all sorts of misinformation in I guess.

I hate that conception that wiki is just crap people threw on a page at random, you must cite sources, that can be verified, it constantly tracks edits, flags them for notification, and confirmation, etc, etc, etc.


My girlfriend tells me that four is brown, and feels like sandpaper, one is yellow and little, two is red, and it's hard to see three. Some of that is from the Schlingerlen(sp?) method of teaching dyslexic children she had, but she also informs me that happiness is yellow, among other things. Hearing about that, and how she mentioned loving math when her teacher used to write problems out for her in roman numerals made me think.

I am a visuo-spatial numeric and visuo-spatial audio synesthete. Musical notes have structure which I can clearly "see", in that I get the impression of something in my field of view, though I am receiving input from my ears. When I spell out a word, I convert the mental impression of the shape I hear into letters. If I've seen the word written properly once, I can spell it correctly with ease after saying it to set the shape in my visual memory.

Similarly I often get random facts where people mention one thing in reference to an unknown related to it, and the impression of reading a page pops up. I just match the shape in my head and say it, the vast majority of the time it is correct or off by a letter or two, though I am often completely uncertain why I know this stuff. Like last night when asked about the name of the troll from the movie Troll, I had the shape of the sound "Tarbok" pop up in my head, his name is apparently Torok, and I don't recall ever seeing the movie except flipping channels, so I must have picked up the sound of the name from that.

I do math by manipulation of the shapes corresponding to the numbers, and their position relative to my internal number line(s).

I despise arabic numerals, they don't actually encode information about the values of the numbers they're supposed to represent, they're just arbitrarily chosen shapes. Whatever manner may be used to relate the value of one symbol to a number doesn't really hold for others. Drawing dots on a 3, or tracing an 8, or making geometric shapes around a 7, whatever you try, you can't apply the same rule to the rest really.

That, and my girlfriends dyscalculia issues led me to make these:

trying to determine how feasible it would be to simply start from scratch, and encode value in symbols which are immune to reversal type errors.

Zero marks off a blank spot, nothing, lack of a point. One is a point, two a line, three adds a new axis, four is built from a pair of twos, five is a two and a three, six is a pair of threes (with the vertical overlapped, for ease of handwriting), seven adds a two to a five, eight adds a two to a six, nine closes off a seven with another two, or adds a mark to eight.

I've already converted completely to using these mentally, and in handwriting, which eliminates the jarring issues I used to have with converting arabic numerals to the structures representing numbers in my head.


I actually assumed the music synesthesia, with the geometric shapes, and textural/structural/"weight"/intensity information, was why people listened to music at all. Didn't realize that not everyone experienced it like that.

I have really bad color+sound to taste synesthesia. I can't watch some movies/TV shows because the color schemes taste so disgusting, and I can't listen to some people talk because it tastes bad...
(for example, salad fingers is especially bad because the color scheme tastes like vomit mixed with blood and his voice tastes like dirt and metal).

I also associate letters/numbers and words with...some sort of physical/emotional presence. I'm not sure if it's synesthesia, because it's not exactly a sensory response. It's more like concepts (like numbers) are characters to me like characters in a movie.

lol @ 3 being blue and female. To me, three is blue and MALE. 3 is a policeman with a beer gut.

The way I remember the pH scale (smaller number = more acidic, larger number = more basic) is this way as well. The word "acid" sounds like a tall skinny man with a hooked nose. "Basic" sounds like an incredibly fat man (think Horace and Jasper from Disney's animated version of 101 Dalmations).
The bigger (fatter) word is the bigger number.

I do not have but would like to have it for a week or two.

I can smell and taste music. Its actually quite strange 0.0

I voted "not sure." I know that I clearly do not have the textbook case of synesthesia. I don't have grapheme-color synesthesia, I don't "see" colors for particular sounds, etc. However, I may have a very mild case of some time-space synesthesias.

Whenever I picture the days of the week, I have a very specific spatial orientation that it follows. The first part is like a ladder, where Monday is at the bottom and Friday is at the top. Saturday is at the beginning of a drop-off, as if the ladder goes into a bottomless roller coaster pit. Sunday, my least-favorite day, is at the bottom of the pit. And when I calculate weeks in advance, I see the dates go along this ladder, up and down, again and again. I also have a specific orientation for months of the year, letters of the alphabet, and years in the 19th-20th Centuries. I never knew this was related to synesthesia until recently. So, this is why I say that I might have a very mild form.

And I have long felt that a certain number should be a certain color ("3" is yellow and "8" is purple for me), but I don't see those numbers as that color when I read them. But if I were asked to color a number in a coloring book, that's what they should be. I also have strongly associated colors for the days of the week (Monday/pink, Tuesday/light blue, Wednesday/golden yellow, Thursday/light purple, Friday/red-orange, Saturday/red, Sunday/gray).
-OddDuckNash99-

It's supposed to be extraordinarily rare overall, if my sources are correct.

It has to be quite consistent to be a textbook case. A lot of people hear the base definition, can relate to it in some way, and therefore assume they have it. Most of my psych teachers haven't even encountered someone who has it.

With the color-sound synesthesia, for example, someone might hear a sound and associate it with an unrelated image that is a certain color. That is not synesthesia.

Numeric-Audio-Visuo-Spatial is fairly rare, Calendar-Spatial is kinda a form of it.

A calendar is a 3D spiral, with the days of the week lining up with the same day above/below it, with the various day/month lines showing up as notes I've scribbled on it. When I recall specific events, the spiral is rotated/translated to the date if I know it specifically, with the impression that it is off in a particular spatial direction.

I recognize the direction as being towards the position of the earth at that time, always been very aware of this.

Right now I'm facing east, so I'm "facing forwards" relative to the rotation of the planet, and the sun is located in a position where I have to point through the planet, a few degrees ahead of my feet, slightly to my right, my angle relative to it has me heading away from it currently, as we near dawn I will be heading almost towards it, and then my motion will curve my path "under" it, so it appears to go above me.

A few hours ago I was moving at the combined speed of the earth rotating + the earth orbiting the sun, but now the orbital vector is west of me.

We're also moving through the milky way, the plane of the earths orbit is tilted up relative to the motion of the sun, so we're moving in a direction a few degrees from solar north.

If you trace all those movements backwards into the past, they form a complex spiraling path, arcing back into the milky way, and that is where my head says memories are "located".