Synesthesia

[theyellowhobbit]

I was talking to boroparkpyro last night, and I told him how I had recently gotten a new credit card number, and I liked the old one better. I asked if it was normal for someone to like one number better than another if neither of them have any special significance. He said it wasn't weird.

And the reason I like one of the numbers better than the other is because the colors are different.

"Colors?" you might ask. Yes, colors. In my mind every number is a certain color. 0 is black, 1 is white, 2 is yellow, 3 is blue, 4 is red, 5 is orange, 6 is purple, 7 is brown, 8 is green and 9 is pink. And the letters also have corresponding colors, both for the Latin alphabet (or whatever you call the one we use) and the Hebrew alphabet. It's been this way ever since I can remember, though I don't think I realized it until middle school.

So boroparkpyro told me I have something called synesthesia. The fact that it has a name and is a neurological "condition" makes it sound like some sort of flaw. Perhaps it is, but it also helps me remember numbers more easily.

Read the wikipedia entry. It's fascinating. There are other forms of synesthesia, such as personifying letters, or in some cases identifying sounds with taste.

Are any of you synesthetes?

Comments

[desh]

No, but I wish I were. I've heard about this before.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

You'd get annoyed when seeing letters/numbers in the wrong colors. Or maybe it would just override it. Black and white doesn't bother me because it's easy to make the switch. I also do see it in black and white as well. It's so hard to explain!!!

Now that I think about it, even punctuation marks have colors!

I'll play around later and write an entry completely in the colors.