Do numbers have colours?

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I've got the idea to post this topic from a topic of jmfoster, who had one about visualising music. Someone responded with ''sinaesthesia'', the over-visualising of things. In my case, all numbers have their own colour or colour pattern. I like some numbers, I love all numbers from 50 to 100, but not 88, and I quite dislike the numbers from 0 to 50. I like 7500. Numbers 50 to 100 are dark. I also see the rank of numbers in my head as a sort of a line, and it goes upwards very fast fter the number 54.

The years is a circle to me, with june under. It is yellow, december is above and is nice dark-blue, november is grey, january is red.

I also see in my head words. When someone says something, I see the letters of the word or sentence in my head, without a spelling mistake. I'm extremely good at Dutch spelling, maybe the words in my head make I hate spelling mistakes. Yes, I hate them. When someone makes one, it is very annoying to me, since I believe it shouldn't be that difficult to write and speak the language of the country where you were born and raised, properly without any mistake. You hear your own language all day! Ok, back to the topic. I see these words and sentences written in my mind.

When someone uses a proverb, I see it as an animated film in my head happen. Like ''You mustn't look a given horse in the mouth'' (don't complain about presents people gave you, they are well-ment and you should be happy and satisfied with them) I see one man holding a horse on a rope, and another one opening the horse's mouth. I see these things all the time.

I have many more examples, but these illustrate in my opinion well what I mean. Do you have it too?

In my case, numbers have the colour of the font in which they were typed. All the numbers on WP are black, as are all the letters.

I associate numbers with emotion or characteristics.
Negative are bad emotions/characteristics, positives are good emotions/characteristics.
I can't really say it in words, but for particular numbers (PI, V2, etc.), I have a particular feeling.
For your info, seeing letters or numbers in a particular colour is synesthesia.

I do the same thing when it comes to numbers and colors. Not all of them are associated with colors. But shapes are! As for numbers I can't stand, it's definitely 39. I can't stand 39.

How do you feel about 42?

42 is actually one of my favorite numbers.

What about 12? I like 12 and 7 and 4. But my favourite is 3.

The number 3 is so prevalent. It's everywhere.

12 is actually a really bad number for me. But 7 is another one of my top favorites and 4 is my top favorite! 3 is a good number, too.

It's actually a number that radiates good energies, but 43 is the opposite... oh and yeah numbers have colors to me they do anyway, same with letters and music.

If they're painted.

In my case, yes I do visualize numbers in colors. But this only applies to the ten basic numbers (1234567890) and not specific numbers. (like say, 21/34/68/53/etc.)
Here is how I normally see them:


1 - Gray

2 - Green/Light green

3 - Brown

4 - Light Blue

5 - Yellow/orange

6 - Red

7 - Purple

8 - Deep blue

9 - Pink

0 - White

To me, colors represent numbers, but not the other way around. I guess it's my technical training, 'cuz it follows the EIA color code for resistors, and not the "ROY G BIV" standard.

BLK = 0
BRN = 1
RED = 2
ORG = 3
YEL = 4
GRN = 5
BLU = 6
VIO = 7
GRY = 8
WHT = 9

Crocodile, you might look into the book "Born on a Blue Day". The name refers to the author, Daniel Tammet, being born on a Wednesday. For him Wednesday is blue. One thing he talks about is how for him all numbers up to 10,000 each have a unique colour, shape, sound, and/or even emotions attached. Apparently 289 (17^2) is quite ugly.

I used to have some associations like this when I was younger. Although not nearly as strongly as "true" synesthesia, and they have tended to get muddled by things I've encountered like what Fnord mentions (I have formal computer/electronics hardware training). Keep in mind that I'm not on the spectrum proper myself. I do still tend to picture numbers as certain types of groupings and therefore shapes. I also have very good intuition with numbers and mathematics, it is something I came "out of the box" with. I know my young [autistic] son is extremely visual with numbers given how and the kind of math problems he processes, but his language is still fairly weak so I haven't queried to exactly what is going on for him, how he's experiencing them. I'm saving that surprise for later.

EDIT: Interestingly I used to be able to not only fluently add/subtract Hexidecimal numbers but even do simple multiplication of them. I've mostly lost that ability due to lack of practice over the last nearly 20 years, it wasn't really something that came up after I left post-secondary. But looking back it always was a bit contrived and didn't feel "natural". I can't say I visualized it really, certainly not in the same way. Perhaps that's what it is like for the "weaker" languages of polylinguists?

Last edited by DwightF on 23 Dec 2008, 3:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.

One thing I do a fair amount of these days where I do manual calculations is play table top role-playing games, where the dice probabilities are important. I visualize the probabilities as graphs and manipulate them as graphs when looking for best choice, or evaluating probability through multiple rolls. This has an advantage in that I can have a higher level overview to quickly locate optimum paths and problem points.

I'm jealous. For me, numbers are just numbers. In fact, if I think of a number, I'm not sure if I always "see" it in my head at all. I do get a feeling in my finger as if I'm making the motion of writing the number, though.

no. they have feelings and shapes.