comments

1. Deron Bauman on April 19th, 2008 at 7:16 pm

   I wish I did.

2. Deron Bauman on April 19th, 2008 at 7:29 pm

   unless this counts.

3. Amy Mabli on April 19th, 2008 at 7:56 pm

   I’d never heard of this until now, but I think I have some of it. Numbers and letters have personalities, sound has color, and I envision the days, weeks, months, and years as three dimensional and having a specific place in space.

   I laughed when I read this because it’s just the way I’d describe what I think of numbers:

   “1, 2, 3 are children without fixed personalities; they play together. 4 is a good peaceful woman, absorbed by down-to-earth occupations and who takes pleasure in them. 5 is a young man, ordinary and common in his tastes and appearance, but extravagant and self-centred. 6 is a young man of 16 or 17, very well brought up, polite, gentle, agreeable in appearance, and with upstanding tastes; average intelligence; orphan.”

   Of course mine have different personalities. 1 is not a child at all, but a small, bald-headed man who keeps to himself.

4. Jeff Harrell on April 19th, 2008 at 8:30 pm

   I do.

   I’m not very well educated on the subject, but the impression I have is that synesthesia is kind of poorly defined, presumably because it’s all so subjective.

   To me, letters, numbers and words are sensory things. They have intrinsic colors, smells and flavors. Things I see also have flavors and smells, and those are usually associated with their colors, though not always in obvious ways. People have distinct flavors and smells — not literally, but in my mind. One of my friends is strawberries and cinnamon; another is black coffee and pencil shavings. An ex-girlfriend was lemons and sandalwood.

   The weirdest ones, for me, are the people who have no flavor or smell at all. These people creep me the hell out, because it’s like they’re not really there. It’s like they’re a cardboard cut-out, or a movie of a person projected on a screen. I always find these people deeply disconcerting, and unpleasant to be around.

   It’s possible that, rather than being an example of synesthesia, what I’m describing is just another symptom of a deep psychosis. Tomayto, tomahto.

5. Jeff Harrell on April 19th, 2008 at 8:33 pm

   Oh. I forgot this one: I perceive loud noises as blinding flashes of light. This is hard to explain, because I don’t actually see anything, but the sensation I get in my mind when I hear a loud, sudden noise is the same sensation I get when a flashbulb goes off. It’s … yeah. I can’t think of a good way to explain it.

   The door to the stairway in the building where I work is on one of those spring-loaded things, but the spring is maladjusted, so it slams really, really hard if you let it close by itself. Whenever I go into the stairway, I put my hands over my ears, because hearing the sound of that door slamming momentarily blinds me.

   I’m weird.

6. Sheila Ryan on April 19th, 2008 at 8:34 pm

   Jeff, I think you’re right to be wary of the people who have no flavor or smell for you.

7. Jeff Harrell on April 19th, 2008 at 8:42 pm

   Sheila, sometimes it’s a side-effect of not knowing someone very well. But that’s not always the case. I can think of one person right now who doesn’t have a sensory association for me, because I’ve only recently become acquainted with her. I can tell there’s something there, but I can’t verbalize it yet; it’s vague, indistinct, still developing. Another person I can think of is like a void in my mind, a complete absence of sensory association, even though I’ve known her for some time and interacted with her a lot. Frankly, she frightens me. It’s like there’s something unnatural about her. I’m incredibly uncomfortable when I’m around her, because she leaves absolutely no impression on me when she’s in the room. It’s like she’s unreal somehow.

   Again with the psychosis. For those of you following along at home, no, my dog has never told me to do anything. Unless you count training me that a certain bark means “I’m not kidding, take me out right now or it’s going to be embarrassing for me and unpleasant for you.”

8. Sheila Ryan on April 19th, 2008 at 9:15 pm

   You have sensitive antennae, Jeff. That’s not altogether a bad thing, and I imagine you know that.

9. Brandon Hobson on April 19th, 2008 at 9:28 pm

   That’s interesting, Jeff. Amy: I perceive days of the week as a sort of circle, or rather an oval, with Monday at the top, Tue, Wed, Thur are on the left side of the oval, Friday is at the bottom, and Sat and Sun are located on the right side of the oval. And even though Monday is at the top, it doesn’t feel like Sunday and Tuesday are directly parallel in terms of their place on the oval. Does any of this make sense? Is this a form of synesthesia?

10. Sheila Ryan on April 19th, 2008 at 9:41 pm

    Brandon, my understanding of what is characterized as synesthesia is that you quite literally perceive one thing (a sound, for instance) in a way radically different from the way most other people process it — as a color or a flavor or what-have-you. I think that to some degree or other there are some of us who translate perceptions customarily absorbed via one sense into representational conventions associated with another sense — and that’s how I think of what you describe with respect to your imagining of the days of the week. True synesthesia, I’m thinking, is something different and altogether more strange to more than 99% of us.

    Anyone out there know anything about this? I sure don’t, so I’m going to try to shut up.

11. ashur on April 19th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    I ran into this idea a couple of months ago, and was really surprised how it described something so internal to my own understanding of letters and numbers.

    Some, though not all, numbers have colors, flavors, smells and the occasional correlative personality. Since I was old enough to understand fractions, I could not shake the feeling that a penny was 1/8 of something intrinsic to the value of a penny itself. It was all very circular and confusing until I realized much later that the number 8 itself has all the characteristics of a penny: it has a copper hue and, more pungently, it tastes of copper.

    Vowels, all of them, are women, but not all consonants are men. Even numbers ARE all male, odds always female.

    My understanding is that people with true cases of synesthesia have entire relationships with these systems and it sometimes allows them to visualize and manipulate letters and numbers more readily. This is not my experience, unfortunately or not. It is more like they have a sheen, a thin layer of whatever it is that makes D a bluish green and 5 a pink lady.

12. ashur on April 19th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

    Also, I think fingernail people deserve a special synesthetic shoutout.

13. India on April 20th, 2008 at 10:11 am

    What. Are fingernail people.

14. Sheila Ryan on April 20th, 2008 at 10:18 am

    Fingernail people are Deron’s little friends.

15. Deron Bauman on April 20th, 2008 at 10:21 am

    say hello….

16. India on April 20th, 2008 at 10:31 am

    Oh, right. I’d blocked that, because it creeped me the hell out.

17. Daryl Scroggins on April 20th, 2008 at 11:09 am

    Didn’t we have lots of comments recently about that documentary “Brain Man”? That has to be the most profound demonstration of synesthesia I have ever seen, with every number having a visual shape, allowing him to “see” complex images that are also mathematical constructs.

    For me there are colors in paintings that have very specific links to emotional memories–often childhood feelings that existed before I had words to trap them. The collision of pink and yellow in DeKooning’s painting always makes me think of a sandpile I was set down in at age one, where I was delighted to see little pink flowers and also feared that my parents, walking away from me and around the house, would never return. Howard Hodgkin’s paintings often do similar things. It’s not really synestesia if one simply associates one thing with another directly; but in this case it’s the emotional algebra of it all that makes me think I’m experiencing it.

18. Amy Mabli on April 20th, 2008 at 11:48 am

    Brandon your days of the week oval shape makes sense to me, as I have something like it in my mind. I explained to Deron last night how I think of the months of the year, how they are positioned and how depending on what month it is, that determines how I view the year. If it’s April, it’s like I’m physically “in” April in my mind, looking out towards May, June, July, etc. The months get progressively smaller as they are further away. Somewhere around September/October I’m turned the other way, facing the year behind me. June, July, and August are also a lighter value and a little wider than the rest of the months.

    I think my mother has this too, since one time she told me how she perceived the months of the year as a neat row of white boxes.

19. Amy Mabli on April 20th, 2008 at 11:49 am

    Don’t know if this counts as synesthesia or down-right craziness, but spoons are female and forks and knives are male.

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