I met my ultra analytical, logically-minded friend jozef for sushi the other day with the intention of having him tear my grad project to shreads. This guy is one of the most strictly atheist, quantifiable, borderline cynic I have the pleasure of being friends with. In some respects he did not disappoint. But I was amazed how clearly he was able to visualize synesthesia.
Maybe the next step is to talk to an accountant?
First, I asked jozef to tell me all he knew about synesthesia:
- neurological condition
- in which the 5 senses are porous, and mix
- some people eat wierd food combinations that produce for them beautiful colours.
- some people taste the sound they hear
- one person feels like gagging when the french horn is played
- synesthesia is impossible for regular people to experience (x)
- synesthesia is easy to dismiss and impossible to prove (x)
Jozef, what happens when you imagine things?
- there is a screen on the inside of my forehead when I imagine all my visualizations occur.
- sometimes when I daydream what I am imagining overshadows what I see my eyes. When I wake up from a daydream I realize that I took no notice of the things around me during that time.
We had a conversation about people > colour synesthesia.
Jozef:
- when I first meet someone I form a split-second opinion about them.
- I often associate the people I meet with a scene in a movie, or quote.
- Whenever I see after the first initial meeting, I think the same lines over again.
- I can’t understand why some people would related individuals to colour.
EXAMPLE
The day I first met her, Jessica told me that short people live longer, because they weren’t always hitting their head on things. She said she’d read it in a book. My friend ingrid leaned over and said, “yeah… she read that in NOTHING!” Those lines play in my head every time someone mentions Jessica.
Please describe to me what you imagine a synesthetes experience of sound / colour might be like:
- colours are vague, not solid
- looks like light and smoke
- sort of like blobs
- the colours have no defined borders
- the colours appear on a flat screen with no depth
- the colours influence each other.
- It’s like when I see someone injuring themselves in a video and I momentarily feel the pain myself.
how does the colour you imagine differ from the colour you see with your eyes?
- when I first recreate a colour in my mind, it is pretty well matched to the colour I saw with my eyes. Then I attach a descriptor word to it (rust red) and later, all I can imagine is the standard shade of the descriptor word and not what I saw with my eyes. (colour changes with time).
- I tend to fill in the blanks with my mind when I can’t accurately recall something.
How do you imagine that someone with synesthesia experiences letter / word > colour synesthesia?
- I imagine that the content of the sentence determines its colour (x)
- the sentence is mostly one colour, (x) but can be changed / influenced by a particularily impactful word.
- neutral words are probably grey (x)
- I like certain words based on what they sound like / signify
- I imagine that certain words change depending on their environment (example: stop sign)
Note: each letter and word is coloured. Not whole sentences. Each letter has a distinct colour that blends together in words. Vowels tend to be more brightly coloured and have more say in colouring the word then other letters. colour tends to be clustered by syllables.
