Grapheme-color synesthesia

[4KookieKids]

Anyone have this or have a kiddo with this? Any way to capitalize on it in our homeschool?

[Eos]

Yes, Dd24 has this.  I don't know much about it but we found out when she was small and couldn't learn the times table.  For maybe two years I tried many different ways to teach her (including bribes!) to no avail.  This was following my first kiddo who was a math geek and I was feeling pretty smug that I had this teach-math-thing down! I finally asked a friend from whom she took art lessons to try, and she figured out that it was synesthesia in one day.  She let my daughter assign the "right" colors to the numbers in the times table and lo and behold, she learned it in a couple of weeks. 

I didn't do much to help her use it during her homeschooling years but when she got to college she took a class on executive function as a college student and she learned how to apply it more broadly.  She's a musician in grad school now and uses it to learn and memorize difficult music - she lightly highlights the passages she's working on in the "right" color to cement the memory.  She also used it to color-code and sort ideas while writing papers eg, main idea gets a green sticky note and all its supporting docs or notes get the same color.  This was helpful but it was most helpful to music, maybe because it's so related to math.  She is a music theory whiz and I think it has to do with this same trait. 

Sometime she'll get a piece of music that has someone else's notes in it and if they're in colored pen she has to white everything out or she gets disoriented.  I don't know much about how it develops in kids, etc. and I confess I was a bit of a scoffer until I saw how it "worked" for her.  You are doing just the right thing by trying to find out more now.

[lewelma]

My younger son has grapheme-color synesthesia and ordinal-linguistic personification. I asked him just now how this helped him in his school work, and he believes that it has made him more creative. But on the negative side, it made math quite mucky as his personification meant that he found negative numbers to be evil, so bauked at those types of problems and at the time I did not know why. He would see a page of yellow vs blue numbers, and would get confused because he kept looking for patterns when there were none. It has also made graphing quite odd as the different parts of the axes are colored based on negative and positive x and y. He also said that when learning to type that his right had was in the yellow spectrum and his left was blue. So it was incredibly confusing for him to have p which is purple to him be on the yellow side, and q which is yellow to him be on the blue side. I never knew he saw these things until he told me when he was about 10. He just didn't know it was unusual or that it explained some of the trouble he was having in math.

Edited January 25, 2021 by lewelma

[bookbard]

I have this as do all the females in my family. The main negative I've noticed is that I'll mix up names that start with letters of similar colours, so Lisa and Jan would be basically the same. If you do find mix-ups based on colour it would be useful to focus on say the second letter which is dissimilar. 

The other synaesthesia related thing we have, which is apparently common, is a way of visualising time. Maybe ask about that, as it could help in terms of planning and organisation. 

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631572-200-the-people-who-can-see-time/