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[personal profile] theyellowhobbit
I was talking to [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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?

Date: 2006-10-26 09:05 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] desh
Also, no offense, but you'd probably make a terrible electrical engineer, because you'd keep getting your colors confused with the standard resistor color codes.

Date: 2006-10-26 09:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com
Wow. Yeah. Zero is the same but everything else is different.

Did someone arbitrarily assign colors to numbers? Maybe he was a synesthete!

Date: 2006-10-29 05:29 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bz-mahrabu.livejournal.com
It's not arbitrary - it's in order of the rainbow (with black, brown, gray, and white on the ends). See also the guitar pick colors in some brands.

Date: 2006-10-29 12:52 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bz-mahrabu.livejournal.com
Yeah, these correspond to neither the resistor color codes nor the pool ball colors nor the NYC subway lines.

Date: 2006-10-29 01:00 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] desh
The NYC subway comparison isn't so fun. You have just 3 colors for 7 digits, and 3 digits (currently) missing entirely. If that was inspired by synesthesia, that was a boring synesthete.

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