Guest Post by Black Bear
Color Me Weird.
About 4 billion years ago, there was some discussion on the forum of synesthesia—what it is, who has it, who doesn’t, and so on. In talking further about it, it seemed like a guest-post-worthy topic… which I then promptly shelved after writing a paragraph or two and playing around with crayons for an evening (you’ll see the results of this effort below.) But lo and behold, I started thinking about it again—don’t remember why now—and decided to try at a post reboot.
I’m highly motivated by color. I have very strong color likes and dislikes—not just in my clothing or home décor, but in pretty much everything. I have clear memories of me at age 6 being HIGHLY upset that we might get the “wrong” color sailboat on the Peter Pan ride at Disneyworld. I would carefully count the number of folks ahead of us in line, and then the sequence of cars on the ride, trying to figure out in advance which color would be ours. I don’t do this kind of thing so much anymore (thank god) but I am still pretty fascinated by deep, intense colors, and I have a strong tendency to associate color with all sorts of things that are not technically colorful. It was a fairly recent surprise to me to learn that not everyone has those associations, and that this tendency is actually a neurological condition called synesthesia.
So first off, if you missed the earlier discussion and you want a clinical explanation of what synesthesia is, go here. It’s the tendency to associate abstract concepts like letters, numbers, and sounds with particular colors, personalities, or spatial locations. The most common kind, as I understand it, is color-based like mine. If I said to you, “What color is the number four?” would you have a ready answer for me? Or would you look at me like I was nuts? If it’s the former, then you’ve probably got some degree of synesthesia. If it’s the latter, you don’t. The key is—and you will have to trust me on this—that the feeling of association is very strong. You can tell me numbers don’t have intrinsic colors til the cows come home, and I can’t really argue with you—but I know 4 is purple. It’s always been purple. And 3 is orange, and so on.
If you’re a color synesthete, you’re nodding as you read this—and if you’re not, you’re thinking, “Seriously? What the hell does she mean, three is orange?’ That when she sees a 3 printed on a page, it glows with an unearthly orange fire?” No. That’s not how it works, at least for me. But any time I picture that particular digit in my mind, it’s orange; and while seeing it in black ink on a white field doesn’t look too odd to me, if you were to write it in another color—say, for instance, purple—it would look “wrong.” Not wrong in an “OH MY GOD I CAN’T BEAR TO LOOK AT IT!” way, but in a “huh. That’s not right, is it?” kind of way. If you gave me a full box of crayons and asked me to write out the alphabet in color, you’d get something like this.
This was an interesting experiment for me, as I’ve not really thought too much about WHY particular colors go with certain letters. I’d always assumed it was a pretty even distribution of colors in my brain—but lo and behold, my alphabet and number line skew a bit to the yellow-orange end of the spectrum, with virtually no blue at all. Additionally, some letters I feel very VERY certain about, and others I’m more squishy on (I spent an embarrassing amount of time here trying to decide what the letter P should look like. Oh, and both o and zero are white, but I did them in black so they’d show up.) I’m a lot more certain about other things, such as colors for the days of the week, the months of the year, and cardinal directions, thus.
The best I can describe this is to say that with the crayons in front of me, I can think “North” and know instantly that I need to reach for the blue crayons. (Again, until I did all this writing down, I’d presumed that my associations for months/days/directions just had to do with the starting letter of the word. June and July are close in color, after all; but as you can see I had to really wrestle with West, N is brown while North is blue, and Tuesday and Thursday are completely different colors. Maybe that’s the Th dipthong…. Argh. My brain hurts.)
Colors also go with sounds; violin is an orange-yellow color, viola deep red, cello a warm medium brown, and bass a dark sepia color. I won’t subject you to the entire orchestra—and my opinions on the colors of woodwinds and brass are a little less firm, anyway. Probably because I play string instruments myself. But generally the deeper the tone, the more saturated the color. Some other synesthetes associate sounds/colors with positions in space: high pitched notes might be down and to the right, for instance, or red might be at 8 on the clock face. I’ve never experienced this to any degree, but it seems just as plausible as thinking that clarinets are blue, so I won’t argue.
In talking to Robin about this, she’s mentioned that she also associates colors with days and other abstract concepts, but that it’s malleable—depends on the day. I’m not sure how this fits in with other types of synesthesia; for me, part of the whole weird package is that it seems so incontrovertible—a Tuesday could never be blue, it’s always pale yellow/orange no matter what Tuesday it is. But I have to wonder if that somehow ties in with the tendency, which I have to some degree, to also associate personalities with abstracts. (My friend Susan once told me, “Sevens can’t be trusted.” I’m not sure I’d agree with that, but I’ve always felt odd numbers were inherently suspicious; prime numbers, doubly so.) While I know this sounds stark raving bats to many of you, I can see how if individual days have moods and personalities, and those personalities have colors associated, then Robin might well have a pale green Monday one week and a pink one the next. But that’s for her to try to explain to you! I’ll just leave you knowing that in my brain, sevens are green, M is blue,* and you’ll have to take my word on it.
* And hellgoddesses are pink. I was just going to leave a footnote but I may have to write another blog entry about some of this. I’ve always had strong synaesthetic-type responses to everything but as I told Black Bear it varies. High pitched notes, for example, are, right now, immediately overhead and sparkly white. But ask me tomorrow. And I’m having my peppermint tea in this mug tonight because it’s been having a bad day and I wanted to cheer it up. Everything is like this. When I was a kid I thought this was just the way it was, and then I learnt that I had a ‘vivid imagination’ and then I wasted some time assuming I was nuts. I may be nuts, but I’m also a (relatively) functional member of society, I write fantasy novels for a living, and the rest of it is, so? Meh. And I also have dogs, so that talking to myself can pass as respectable.
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