I recall a day when I was younger, walking through a grocery store having a very strange discussion with my mom. We were discussing colors, letters, numbers and genders. I told her that I thought that certain numbers and letters were like certain colors, and that that different numbers, letters and colors had different genders and personalities. She obviously thought that this was very strange. I also thought that some of her opinions were downright silly. I thought of a medium to dark blue as a 30ish male, and she said she thought that it was a baby boy, because blue was the symbolic color for boys. I told her that this had nothing to do with popular tradition, and we basically let the topic drop. At the time, I chalked all of it up to a highly overactive imagination.
About a month ago, I learned about something called synaesthesia (also can be spelled synesthesia) from the Smithsonian magazine. Instantly, I thought that this phenomenon was really awesome, basically because I love anything strange. Webster's dictionary defines synesthesia as 'a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color'. I looked this up on the internet and joined an email group on synaesthesia. Since then, I've decided that the episode I spoke of in the last paragraph was NOT my imagination, but perhaps a form of synaesthesia. I showed the article in the magazine to a friend, and she exclaimed, "So that's what that is!" I think there are more synaesthetes around than scientists knew about.
Also, my synaesthesia doesn't show up as vividly as some other people's. I have a tendency to turn it on and off. When I set out a couple of weeks ago to figure out exactly which colors I associated with which letters, I had to take a big piece of blank paper and write that letter over and over and over again in caps in order to concentrate on it enough to "see" its color.
My mind is trying to unconvince me. I realized after I had gotten the alphabet down that I saw B as blue, G as green, P as purple, R as brick red, O as being a gray with the slightest orange tint, and Y as being half gray and half (very) light yellow. Now I can't decide if my mind did that on purpose, if I've been able to read color words for so long that the colors got assigned to my letters or if I'm really not a synaesthete at all. Urgh.
