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Does this description line up with what synesthesia looks like?

Indigo Blue

By Indigo Blue,
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kellebelle

kellebelle

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Yes, from what I know, it’s a type of synesthesia. Here’s an article about it: https://synesthesia.com/blog/grapheme-color-synesthesia/

My 18 year old daughter has this with numbers as colors and each number has personality as well! It’s quite interesting! She had no idea that not everyone associates colors with numbers - we figured this out a few years ago. She is not on the spectrum, so no correlation for us there. I do have a form of synesthesia and I hear that it runs in the family. 

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Matryoshka

Matryoshka

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This is a type of synesthesia. I think associating letters and/or numbers with colors is one of the most common kinds?

One if my dds figured out she has a different kind where numbers have some kind of shape/pattern in her head (no colors) - it's a less common kind. She said she had thought everyone did that.  Apparently for her dates have a different shape pattern than 'regular' numbers.  She's also my kid who ended up a CompSci/math double major...

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regentrude

regentrude

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1 hour ago, purpleowl said:

Both of my girls have colors associated with letters and numbers. My son (who is autistic) has colors associated with music - like, if a song is in the key of C, the song is orange. I think. I may be mixing up how it works, lol. But definitely some sort of synesthesia.

I had that as a kid. I distinctly remember a brown song I had to play on the violin when I was five. It was a beginner song on the D string. We referred to it by color. The one on the A string was red.

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Indigo Blue

Indigo Blue

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Well, I’ve always known that things in my head have patterns, but not colors. Synesthesia.com says something about that. I’ve never thought of that as a type of synesthesia. It’s probably not in my case…weird. 
 

The numbers from 1 to 10 go across horizontally until 10. Then 11 is on top of 10 and the rest go up vertically from there into infinity.

The months are all vertical starting with January, going down with one underneath the other. Oddly, December is to the right of November. 
 

No colors, but numbers are white on a black background and months just look like a calendar in my mind with black letters on white background. 
 

Days of week are spelled out and are stacked in my mind starting with Monday and going up with one over the other with Sunday being at the top of the vertical stack of words. 
 
It never changes, and it’s been like this as long as I can remember. 

But probably everyone does some sort of thing like this in their mind. 

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lewelma

lewelma

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My younger boy has both colour and personalities associated with numbers. I did not know he had it until he told me at about the age of 13. He just didn't know it was unusual so never talked about it, but it did explain a number of issues he had with math.

1. For a child so brilliant at math, he often spent a lot of time thinking about something easy. I could never figure out what was going on in his head because I didn't know he had synethesia. Basically, he was looking for patterns in why 2 different colour numbers would add up to another colour. In his eyes, there had to be a reason for the colour relationships. This was a problem in both computation but also algebra.

2. Positive numbers were good and negative numbers were evil. This is why he fought so hard with me about multiplication of integers. A positive times a negative was always negative, and he loathed that evil always won. It was also an issue with addition and subtraction, but at least it was not an always evil winning. Basically, he fought very hard to find away around evil winning. He tried and tried to find another way, which obviously stalled his ability to accept basic mathematic principles.  He simply would not accept that evil always won, so he finally refused to do math with negative numbers.

3. Graphing was a problem because the 4 quadrants were both different colours and different evilness. He struggled with graphing because of how relationships (lines, parabolas) would change colour as they moved between the 4 quadrants. He was always trying to find the reason why. Looking for patterns when none existed meant that he didn't focus on the patterns that did exist.

Overlay this with his dysgraphia and the inability to logically/linearly understand, organize, and write math, and it was a crazy big problem, and I didn't even know about the synethesia. This is why I stalled him at preAlgebra for 3 years from the age of 9 to 12. There was just something missing, something that wasn't connecting, and I couldn't figure it out. Now, if he had just told me..... LOL

Point being, this boy is a math genius like his older brother, but the synethesia really impacted his abilities and took me YEARS to sort out.

 

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Rosie_0801

Rosie_0801

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To my understanding, it's not just associating colour with number (or whatever your thing.) It's something a bit beyond that. I associate some colours with people because, say, they wear them often. That's not my synesthesia. Try asking how/where they see it. Sometimes the seeing feels more in my mind, sometimes I experience it with my eyes even though I know it's a mind trick.

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Indigo Blue

Indigo Blue

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3 minutes ago, Rosie_0801 said:

To my understanding, it's not just associating colour with number (or whatever your thing.) It's something a bit beyond that. I

Yes, this is my thinking based on my limited understanding,  but I was curious to see what responses this would get and thought maybe I am not understanding correctly. It’s so fascinating, though. 

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Rosie_0801

Rosie_0801

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6 minutes ago, Indigo Blue said:

Yes, this is my thinking based on my limited understanding,  but I was curious to see what responses this would get and thought maybe I am not understanding correctly. It’s so fascinating, though. 

I think it would be harder for number-colour to develop as a "mere" association. How would that happen? Person internalising the wall chart from when they were in kinder? 

I suppose that could happen and it'd still be interesting because brains don't usually bother to remember that sort of thing.

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Matryoshka

Matryoshka

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2 hours ago, Indigo Blue said:

Well, I’ve always known that things in my head have patterns, but not colors. Synesthesia.com says something about that. I’ve never thought of that as a type of synesthesia. It’s probably not in my case…weird. 
 

The numbers from 1 to 10 go across horizontally until 10. Then 11 is on top of 10 and the rest go up vertically from there into infinity.

The months are all vertical starting with January, going down with one underneath the other. Oddly, December is to the right of November. 

No colors, but numbers are white on a black background and months just look like a calendar in my mind with black letters on white background. 

Days of week are spelled out and are stacked in my mind starting with Monday and going up with one over the other with Sunday being at the top of the vertical stack of words. 
 
It never changes, and it’s been like this as long as I can remember. 

But probably everyone does some sort of thing like this in their mind. 

That's the kind my dd has, and it's pretty much as you describe it except of course her patterns are different.  It's called Number Form Synesthesia, which is a type of spatial-sequence synesthesia.  There are a whole bunch of different kinds, and pretty much everyone who has it is different (like associates different colors with letters, even if colors/letters are the thing, or has a different form/sequence for the numbers).  

https://www.thesynesthesiatree.com/2021/03/spatial-sequence-synesthesia.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Number_form

And no, not everybody does some sort of thing like this in their mind, far from it.  That's exactly what dd thought, until she was talking to someone and it somehow came up and she realized that this was unusual.  Number-form synesthesia is actually a much less common type.

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kbutton

kbutton

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15 minutes ago, Matryoshka said:

spatial-sequence synesthesia

At least one of my kids and I do this with calendar stuff. I think I do it with other sequences, but I hadn't thought about until this page mentioned things like books of the Bible. I'll have to pay more attention.

Some people are not visual in their mind at all for anything. They can't even recall fairly common things visually. My MIL thought it was absurd once when I was trying to tell her about signage she would see when she got near something she wanted to drive to (asking for directions). She had zero idea that anyone else would know or remember from one time to the next that interstate signs are green, but that signs for historic or touristy things along the interstate were brown. She's spent enormous amounts of time on interstates in her lifetime.

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Matryoshka

Matryoshka

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15 minutes ago, kbutton said:

At least one of my kids and I do this with calendar stuff. I think I do it with other sequences, but I hadn't thought about until this page mentioned things like books of the Bible. I'll have to pay more attention.

Some people are not visual in their mind at all for anything. They can't even recall fairly common things visually. My MIL thought it was absurd once when I was trying to tell her about signage she would see when she got near something she wanted to drive to (asking for directions). She had zero idea that anyone else would know or remember from one time to the next that interstate signs are green, but that signs for historic or touristy things along the interstate were brown. She's spent enormous amounts of time on interstates in her lifetime.

It's amazing how differently we all process the world. I have a very good spatial sense, and do have good visual memory, but I don't do this at all with any kinds of numbers. Colors of road signs absolutely I've noticed...  but I noticed even when my kids were young they remembered all the highway exit numbers,  which I usually remember by the name, rather than number, except for ones I use really frequently. 

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Dicentra

Dicentra

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It definitely sounds like synesthesia to me.  My dd is has synesthesia for colours and numbers (and days of the week) but much more strongly for music and colours.  She's currently working on a project with her university piano instructor (who is also a visual artist) and the symphony orchestra in the city where she attends university.  She assisted with the programming of a concert (that's coming up in a few weeks! :)) and went through Rimsky- Korsakov’s Scheherazade and wrote down all the colours (and textures - that's also part of her synesthesia) she "sees" and her piano instructor has created pieces of art work based on what my dd "sees" during the piece.  The art work will be part of the concert experience and my dd will give some talks about how the colours and textures and music come together for her.  Rimsky-Korsakov was also a synesthete so that's kind of cool. 🙂  Dd and her piano instructor used paint chip catalogues from Benjamin Moore paints to make sure that her instructor/the artist was using the same colours as the ones my dd was describing.

My dd also has perfect pitch.  I have no idea if that's related at all to the synesthesia but it would be interesting to research.

I think it's fascinating that there are so many synesthetes here!  But it also fascinates me that there are so many INTJ women here.  It's kind of like some sort of gathering point for rare introverted/potentially-on-the-spectrum/INTJ females.  Maybe SWB has some sort of ultrasonic signal that plays when the forum is accessed that acts like a lure. 😉 🙂

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saraha

saraha

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My ds with synesthesia said:

I've never really associated colors. think it's mostly gender. Dunno about 1, 2 is male, 3 is female, 4 is female, 5 is male, 6 is female, 7 is male, 8 is male, 9 is male.
I guess 4 has kind of a motherly feel, and 9 is maybe a little... mischievous?
I don't remember ever having any associations with negative integers.

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