I was talking to a friend of mine a while back about school and somehow we landed on the subject of math. Neither of us did well in math, and he began to describe his early childhood difficulty with numbers. Apparently he couldn’t remember them without assigning a gender to the number. I had never heard of that, but before I could call the kettle black I realized that somewhere along the way I assigned each number a color.
For example, two is yellow, so is eight. Four is green and seven is blue. Six is most definately orange and zero is white while one is black.
Come to think of it, I didn’t do this in order to learn them, I just thought of certain colors when I heard numbers. To this day I do this is with music too. When I hear a song, I can generally feel what “color” it is. Some are metallic blue…others red. Jars of Clay’s first album is green, for some reason… a medium value green with a dark green middle…in a 3 dimensional form.
Yeah, I have no idea either…
I’ve always done this instinctively, and it only recently dawned on me how weird it is.
Huh. I never did anything of the sort. Maybe I’m the freak.
Geof F. Morris
February 11th, 2005
wow, that is wierd.
happy birthday eve!
mike
February 11th, 2005
Visually stimulated people (artists, photographers, etc.) tend to do this sort of thing.
I do this thing where if I have to subtract larger numbers in my head, I shift them to the nearest ten and then add/subtract the difference.
Example:
533-249=284
In my head, I would do 530-250 and get 280,add the 4 that I rounded out and come up with 284.
It’s warped, I know, but it works for me.
Chris (from L.C.)
February 11th, 2005
Your story reminds me of this:
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/9766414.htm
I have heard of people doing this before, so I googled “seeing colors music” and came up with this. Does that sound like you? Do you do it to that level? If so, you are a synesthete.
I assigned genders to my crayons and I would have them pair off and get married. Red and blue, green and yellow, black and white . . . and purple and orange (because they were what was left).
Kari
February 11th, 2005
Whoa, yeah actually I might have that. I don’t think I do it with food so much…just sounds and numbers. Especially music…I didn’t know there was a term for it.
“But in some people the connections are not pruned and the brain connections continue to work. “Synaesthetes are a minority who are more conscious than the rest of us,” he said.”
I’m not weird…I’m more conscious
brian
February 11th, 2005
I assigned colors to numbers, but probably more because of C-rods and Basic programming (which TOTALLY messed up the C-rod schemata) than my own brain.
I am, however, constantly grouping things into little categories in my head, then seeing how to find common themes amongst the different categories and….well… now that you all know just how OCD I am, I’ll stop
Susan
February 12th, 2005
i sounds as if i am in the minority among your readers.
i’m the wierd one.
oh well, happy birthday.
mike
February 12th, 2005
Mike and I were talking about this last night, and he was surprised I had heard of it before. It’s cool that you can do that. You should put “synesthete” on your resume.
Kari
February 12th, 2005
I don’t know how to pronounce “synesthete” heheheh.
I’ve always known that I’ve done it..but I’ve never really thought about the fact that I do it until recently…if that makes sense.
brian
February 12th, 2005
Mike and I are freaks together. WOO!
Geof F. Morris
February 12th, 2005
I’m in the freak club, too! How about the fact that my wife’s hairspray smells “purple”?
Roger
February 14th, 2005
A Brief Musical Observation
I have found, while paying attention to my musical leanings, something to be quite true over the last several months: If I want to identify with a song, I listen to a male voice singing it. If I want to hear a story and not feel pressured to identify …
GFMorris.com
February 14th, 2005