Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Number-color synaesthesia?

Does anyone out there have experience, either personally or through a DC or spouse, with number-color synaesthesia? This is the phenomenon of experiencing numbers to "have" certain colors.

I was stunned this morning to discover that DS4 has very definite color associations for a large array of numbers but that, as he told me, "Some of them haven't been painted yet." I can't quite tell whether this was a genuine sensory phenomenon for him or whether he was making it up, but the number-color associations were constant over the course of the morning, and he seemed to think I was silly to keep asking him what color the various numbers were. ("I already told you, Daddy. Seven is orange!") On the other hand, he has a very good memory, and he could just have been remembering the original (arbitrary) assignments.

I know some about the phenomenon from the psychological and neuroscientific literature, but I've never met someone who really has it. (Though I gather it's more common than you'd think.)

Thoughts?

BB

There was a discussion a while back about number gender and color, there were some interesting links.

http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/21732/1

Thanks mamaandmore - I read that thread and the links. It's interesting, but I guess I was wondering if anyone has had much personal experience with the phenomenon. For one thing, I'm struck by DS's assertion that "some of the colors haven't been painted yet". He seems to think that it's just a matter of time before the rest of the numbers have colors. As far as I know there's almost no literature on the development of number-color synaesthesia. So I wonder if anyone has any anecdotal evidence about whether during development the synaesthete experiences numbers as coming to have colors over time. It would make sense - as one learns more and more names for colors one might become more sensitive to the various colors of things and therefore be able to associate them with new numbers. But I just have never heard anything about this.

BB

No idea. I'm reading with interest though. I find quirky psychological stuff like this to be just facinating! Please share what you find, even if it's not from here, would you BBDad?

Hi, BBDad!

You do have an interesting little guy, don't you? Fascinating.

The only thing close to this that I know much about is the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, who associated pitch with colour. At least one of his pieces (Poem of Fire) has a part for a "colour organ"; it had a regular keyboard, but instead of sound, it projected coloured lights onto a screen as the rest of the orchestra played. (I believe Rimsky-Korsakov had similar beliefs, but somewhat different associations of which colours were implied by specific pitches.) Scriabin when he died was working on a huge multimedia piece called Mysterium--it was to be played in the foothills of the Himalayas, and there were to be music, dance, colored lights, and perfumes--and at the end, the world was to dissolve in bliss....I think he had some association with theosophy and Madame Blavatsky. I don't remember much more than this (he was about a hundred years after "my" time, for research purposes), but it's enough to give you the idea.

I'm sure this is no help at all, but thought it might be a little bit interesting, under the circumstances.

peace
minnie

Hi BBDad,

Both DD and I have this, though it's much more associated with letters than numbers in our case. Dd's letter-colors and mine do not coincide, though a few of them are the same. They have textures, too.

I was amazed to find out that not everyone has this; DH doesn't and he just looks at us like we're crazy whenever we start to argue what color a particular letter is. Makes life more interesting, that's for sure! Reportedly it's more common among females than males. I do wonder if math-oriented folks have strong association with number-color and more verbal people tend towards letter-colors.

BTW, 7 is forest green, not orange.....

About 3 years ago, friends of our had just had their third child. When I told my dd (then about 4) what the little baby's name was, her response was, "Hmmm, that's surprising." I didn't know what she meant, and asked her to explain. She replied, "The name doesn't go with their other names. Theirs are all orange and hers is blue." Now, even by dd standards, it was an odd comment to make so I asked her to explain. It turns out the she associates particular letters (and numbers) with different colors and so based on the letters that make up a name or word, there is a prevalent color that she associates with that. I asked her to make out a sheet with all the letters and numbers written out in the colors she sees them in. I thought it was interesting at the time, but then just filed the paper away. About a year and a half later the topic came up again and I asked dd if she still saw colors with her letters and she said yes. I asked her to write them out for me on a sheet of paper and when she was done, I dug the old copy out of the basement and I was stunned at how consistent they were. But, I also know dd has an extraordinary memory, so it could just be that. I really don't think she has synaesthesia, but I do think it's interesting that someone else has experienced this!

I know there are some Oliver Sacks fans on this board .
In one of his recent books, Musicophilia, he writes about a composer with "music-color synesthesia" - he would see specific colors when hearing music in different keys. He also talks about other interesting and weird brain differences in musicians, like musical seizures and things like that...

http://www.amazon.com/Musicophilia-Tales-Music-Oliver-Sacks/dp/1400040817

I had day-of-the-week/color synesthesia when I was a kid. Tuesday was definitely green! DD5 has day-of-the-week underwear and they are each a different color. I wonder if she's going to think of Monday as pink when she is older

Thanks to everyone for all the responses! A quick word or two to report what I know about synaesthesia. (Blame Kriston for asking!)

First, there are indeed lots of different kinds. Tone-color synaesthesia, of the sort that minniemarx reports for Scriabin, is often found in musicians. Not surprisingly, there is a higher incidence of perfect pitch among tone-color synaesthetes than among normals. (Perfect pitch amounts to something like being able to identify colors for them.) There is also general grapheme-color synaesthesia - association of either letters or numbers or both with colors. There doesn't seem to be agreement among synaesthetes about what color the various graphemes are (hence Emm's family squabbles!). But there are patterns. It's much more likely for instance, if you're a synaesthete, that you'll see the letter A as red than as blue or yellow. In addition, there is also a relatively common but little-studied kind of synaesthesia that gives shape - sometimes a very convoluted shape - to the number line. And Oliver Sacks writes famously about taste-shape synaesthesia in his essay "The man who tasted shapes."

But perhaps the most interesting work on synaesthesia was done about 8 years ago by Ramachandran. He established pretty conclusively that at least one type of synaesthesia (what he calls "lower synaesthesia") is a strictly low-level sensory phenomenon. The synaesthete isn't just remembering the color of the refrigerator magnets he had as a child - he's actually seeing colors. Ramachandran's group established this with a pop-out task. Look at the picture on the left in the link here. It is a mix of 2's and 5's, but for the non-synaesthete it can be very difficult to pick out the one from among the other. For the synaesthete, by contrast, the 2's pop-out very quickly, since they are experienced as a different color than the 5's. The synaesthete's experience is modeled with real colors in the picture on the right. The synaesthete answers much more quickly than normals the question "What shape do the 2's make?" (Answer: a triangle.) Pop-out phenomena like this are well-established as low-level sensory phenomena, so the fact that the synaesthetes can perform this task so much faster than normals shows that they are really sensing colors, not just remembering them or associating them. Not all synaesthetes are lower synaesthetes, however, so failing the pop-out task is no guarantee that someone doesn't have synaesthetic experience. Or so Ramachandran argues.

If I think too much about the colors, they fade away. It's as if I'm seeing them in my mind's eye, not actually printed on the page. Otherwise reading would be extremely distracting.

But "A" is most definitely yellow, and hard-edged! (DD would disagree with me, I'm sure...)

Ruby, I'm pretty sure your dd DOES have synaesthesia. Names are fascinating to me as they sometimes go very well with what I see as the personality of the namee, and they sometimes don't. First and last names also sometimes make pleasing combinations, and sometimes they don't.