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

that is so interesting! I have never heard of this before, but i do understand how someone can see colours in numbers and letters. I have always (since childhood) thought of numbers and letters being masculine or feminine. Not quite the same thing, but along the same lines maybe?

Interesting. I wonder if some people are primed to develop such strong associations among different sensory experiences that the pathways become so ingrained as to evoke the original (in this case color) experience in it's pure neurological/sensory form even it's not consciously remembered (i.e., it would result in a "lower" synesthesia). So maybe BDad's DS hasn't yet had the (unconscious) experience of the remaining numbers being associated with a color, that's why they haven't been "painted" yet. I always wondered why I always "saw" green when I thought about Tuesday, but other days of the week had no color.

There's a young adult novel about a girl with synesthesia. It's "A Mango Shaped Space". I really enjoyed reading it as an adult a few years ago.

I think many people have associations with puzzles, magnets, etc. that may fade with age. True synesthesia is pretty rare, as far as I can tell. It is interesting though, that it appears to occur more often in the gifted population.

Well, I gave dd the test linked in BaseballDad's message and it took her awhile to see the pattern. I asked wasn't it easier to see the 2's because they are a different color than the 5's and she looked at me like I was nuts. She said, "They're both black!" So I asked her to explain how she sees the color. If I understand her correctly, things that are printed look the color they are printed in, but when she thinks about a letter, number, or word, she sees them in her mind with colors. I found this so interesting, I made her write out the letters and numbers in the color she saw and I then pulled out the old sheets. She had about 90% the same (last time she did this it was 9/2007). When I showed her the comparison, like that her d is green on one and brown on another, she explained that it's really brown but with a greenish tone too and we don't have a marker with the correct color. I noticed that the shade is very specific too. In all three times she did this, her s was light green and t dark green, but other times she had to explain that the blue really should be light, but we don't have the right shade. I guess we'll have to take a trip to Lowes for paint chips to get an accurate color representation.

Very interesting, Ruby. It's standard in the literature to say that imagined graphemes are more strongly associated with their colors than visually presented ones. The main reason is that there's an interference effect with visually presented colors when the actual color and the synaesthetic color fail to match. I suppose it's possible to have the effect only for imagined graphemes, but I don't know of cases like that discussed in the literature.

I'm interested to see how DS does on the task. I did notice that this morning he looked very deliberately at the digital clock display and saw the number 40 in bright yellow lights, before reporting that 40 is gray.

BB

Love this topic, funny I was just thinking about it the other day. I probably posted this in a prev. thread, but my sister does have number-color syna. I am so jealous, it sounds fabulous! Are there drawbacks?
I haven't heard of any.

She also has genders for the various numbers, my ds has mentioned this as well, although not colors. I did read that people who have been tested will come back year after year, many years between tests and note the exact same colors/attributes for numbers.

BaseballDad - just very curious, the number 40 isn't a combo of two different colors, for 4 and 0? It is it's own unique color? (Gray made me think of that color you get when you mix all the paints)

Chris: I'm not really sure why DS thought that 40 has a distinct color. He seemed to think of 40 as a stand-in for a generic large number: he said that both 100 and infinity are also gray, and that was because they are large numbers. One thing I'm interested in, though, is whether more numbers come to have colors over time - as a child matures. Not sure. In any case, there are definitely some adult synaesthetes who have individual responses to large numbers. Daniel Tammet, for instance, says that each number up to 10,000 has a distinct experiential profile for him. That said, I'm not at all sure that our DS counts as a number-color synaesthete. I showed him the pop-out image and he had some trouble even finding all the two's. So do I, but I don't think numbers have colors in the first place.

BB

Update: I think I'm ready to take it back. Even though he didn't get the pop-out phenomenon, DS seems exceedingly certain about the color of numbers. He just regenerated the entire list from this morning without hesitation. A lot of numbers were white, but when I asked him why he said that "That's because they're not alive yet." Occasionally he called a number white by accident and then corrected to the color he had named it this morning. He even said that letters have colors. Then he showed me some pictures of letters in the book we were reading. "Look," he said. "A is red, B is blue, and C - oh wait, they got the color wrong on this one!" That is just too strange to be a coincidence. To be certain, as he was, that a letter is a different color than the color it is printed - well, that just has to indicate some association that I don't really have myself.

Wow, this is REALLY an interesting topic. I will definitely go read the link to the other thread. Do keep us posted BB. I would love to know how you figure out if your DS has this.