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.

[rivka-m.livejournal.com]

no, but that's soooo cool!

I do feel sometimes, like numbers, and to a lesser degree letters have, well, character, I guess I'd call it, but not really personality. hard to describe, but I do prefer certain numbers for that reason. Like I like 9 ad 7 better than 8 or 5.

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

Exodus 20:14:

יד וְכָל-הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת-הַקּוֹלֹת וְאֶת-הַלַּפִּידִם, וְאֵת קוֹל הַשֹּׁפָר, וְאֶת-הָהָר, עָשֵׁן; וַיַּרְא הָעָם וַיָּנֻעוּ, וַיַּעַמְדוּ מֵרָחֹק.

And all the people saw the qôlôth [thunders/sounds/voices], and the flashes, and the sound of the shôfor, and the mountain on smoke; and the people saw, and they trembled, and they stood far away.

(My favorite instance of religious synesthesia. This is what may happen in experiences that go beyond normal sensory perception, or at least merge what are normally separate senses.)

To quote the payyeton Shim`ôn bar Yitzhoq bar Ovun (Mahzôr for Shavu`oth, ed. J. Fränkel, p. 267):

וְכָל-הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת-הַנִּרְאֶה וְהַנִּשְׁמָע
וְשׁוֹמְעִים אֶת-הַנִּשְׁמָע וְאֶת-הַנִּרְאֶה
כְּשֶׁהַדִּבּוּר יוֹצֵא מִפִּי הַגְּבוּרָה / וְנֶחְצָב עַל-הַלֻּחוֹת בְּתִפְאָרָה
קוֹל קוֹלֵי קוֹלוֹת וְרוּחַ סְעָרָה / וְלַפִּיד לַפִּידֵי לַפִּידִים אֵשׁ בֹּעֵרָה
קוֹל יי בַּכֹּחַ וְקוֹל יי בַּהֲדָרָה / מְפָרֵשׁ אֶת-הַדִּבּוּר לְבָאֵרָה

And all the people were seeing both the visible and the audible,
And haring both the audible and the visible;
When the WORD went forth from the mouth of the Strong One, / and was engraved upon the tablets, gloriously,
Voice of voices of voices, and a stormy wind, / and the flash of flashes of flashes, a burning fire,
Voice of YHWH in mightiness, and voice of YHWH in beauty / was explaining the WORD, to make it clear.

[cynara-linnaea.livejournal.com]

Yep, heard of that before. Actually, nuqotw said in a meme once that she associates 0-9 with colors. Ask her about it.
I associate words with colors, moreso when I get tired. What I do most is associate words with flavors (I count texture to be part of flavor).

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

Grr. In the second line of my translation of the poem, that should read "hearing", not "haring".

[alanscottevil.livejournal.com]

That's a beautiful piyyut.

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I copied and translated only the first five lines, out of 64. Thus, I have included only about 7.8%. Perhaps I shall transcribe and translate the entire thing as a post on my Blogspot blog.

[rivka-m.livejournal.com]

woah-- that's beautiful. I'll have to remember this come parshat yitro. and shavuot.

[boroparkpyro.livejournal.com]

i agree, this piyut is amazing! will i find this in my Yekke makhzeiaurim? i don't remember who the editor is to know if it's the same edition or not.

[batshua]

I associate some smells or tastes with colors, but they're really obvious ones.

Like red teas or green smells.

What does my phone number look like?

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

It's the silluq for the Qerôvo ארח חיים מוסר תוכחת, which in many (most?) Ashkenazzi communities is recited on the SECOND day of `Shovu`ôs, but is printed in the Rödelheimer in the FIRST day's tefillôs (and thus is recited at KAJ).

In the bilingual Hebrew-English Rödelheimer which you own (translated by Jenny/Rivko Marmorstein, Basle, 1967), our silluq begins on p. 65, and runs through the middle of p. 67.

[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.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

The article talks about personification as another type of syensthesia. So you might be a fellow synesthete.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

Well I could tell you what colors it is, but then people could just figure out your number. But that's all it is- translate each number to the color I gave in the key above, and that's what it looks like. It's a pretty well balanced combination, though I like my phone number better.

[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!

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

So you might also have it. And nuqotw probably as well.

It's weird. L and N are both orange, but there's something different about them, and I don't know what it is. I need a big color chart or something. Maybe the L is a lighter orange...

[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.

[rivka-m.livejournal.com]

interesting... only what I do seems so minor that I'm not sure it makes the cut. Guess that means I should read the article.

[nuqotw.livejournal.com]

I do this for the integers 0 - 9, and it's definitely some association to a calculator keypad. I don't associate specific colors. 0 is white or a very pale blue/green. 1,2,3 are pastels. 4,5,6 are bluish. 7,8,9 are orange brown and very ugly.

[sirena-lupin.livejournal.com]

*raises hands* Right here. Words have colors and tastes. *shrug*

[platypuses.livejournal.com]

THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT THIS IN MY PSYCH 1 CLASS TODAY, but didn't name it. In our lecture on memory. Does it improve your memory for numbers any?

[bz-mahrabu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, these correspond to neither the resistor color codes nor the pool ball colors nor the NYC subway lines.

[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.

[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.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

I think so. I have a pretty good memory for numbers in general. Like I can memorize phone numbers, credit card numbers, etc. pretty easily. I bet I could even memorize a lot of pi if I cared to. But I'm not that kind of geek. Give me something to memorize next time you see me.