Synesthesia: A Colorful World

I have synesthesia.

There is no medicine I can take to fix it.

It is just something I was born with.

And it is never going away.

Wow, yeah I know. Take that in.

I … am eternally cursed … with seeing numbers and letters in fantastic rainbow colors!

Haha, did I scare you? Well there is no need to fret. Synesthesia by definition is “a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway,” and it is caused by a genetic wiring in your brain that can’t really be undone. There are many different types of synesthesia that link space, shapes, taste, and sound. I have the most common form of it, which is called Grapheme-Color Synesthesia. That means, whenever I see, hear, or think of letters and numbers, I see colors with them. Every letter and number is associated in my head with a certain color, and when they are combined to make words or larger numbers, the colors kind of mush together. Some colors are eliminated, and other colors stand out more prominently, so that each word or number has its own unique color scheme.

Let me give you an example of this using my name: H A L E Y. In my head, H’s are pink, A’s are yellow, L’s are lime green, E’s are leafy green, and Y’s are also lime green. But for some reason in my mind the pink and yellow are very dominate in this word. So overall my name takes on a warm, mellow tone. How about another example – my birth year: 1995. 1 is royal blue, 9 is such a deep purple it is basically black, and 5 is orange. In this case the nines take over and the number is mostly black with a hint of orange on the end. The royal blue goes away.

That is the basic phenomenon of Grapheme-Color Synesthesia. In case you’re wondering, YES this helps with memorization to an extreme degree. Connecting letters and numbers with colors naturally has always helped me remember people’s names, birthdays, and it has helped me study for tests. But sometimes it can work against me and throw me off, like if I take notes in a pink colored gel pen, but all the words I’m writing down are blue, black, and red in my head. That just clashes horribly, and makes memorizing doubly difficult. Or sometimes when I see children’s building blocks with the alphabet is written on them in different colors. If “A” is written on the block in green, but I know that “A” is actually yellow, it feels very wrong and off-kilter.

The thing about synesthesia, is there is no set color scheme of association across the board. A lot of synesthetes associate different colors with letters and numbers. For example, some synesthetes may think the letter “B” is red, but I definitely see it as black, or sometimes blue, depending on the context. Most synesthetes aren’t even aware that they have synesthesia. They just think everyone is like that. I didn’t know I saw numbers and words differently until the sixth grade, when I read the book, “A Mango Shaped Space” by Wendy Mass. In this book, a girl named Mia Winchell sees colors in different shapes whenever she hears sounds, which demonstrates another type of synesthesia called Chromesthesia. I felt so special and understood when I read that beautiful book, because I had no idea that not everyone else saw colors and numbers like I did! (Well, I knew my twin sister Heather did because sometimes we talked about it and argued over what colors certain words should be – she is also a synesthete). It was so cool to read a kid’s book explaining the unique phenomenon that I had thought was normal my whole life!

Some people have asked me if synesthesia is distracting or annoying in reading, writing, and math, and the answer is no. When I told my friend Kayla about it one time, she described the phenomenon back to me as watching cars pass on the road. Your mind knows the color of every car that passes by, and if you were to focus on it, you could name the color of every one. But it is not something you necessarily have to bring to your conscience thought, though the colored cars are still there. While the colors are always there when I’m reading, I can breeze over them without deliberately noticing them.

Synesthesia is something that I treasure. I love colors and color coordinating, because I think they make life more exciting, and organizing and memorizing easier. (You better believe my science folder was always green, my history folder always blue, and my math folder always pink or red when I was in school!) It is so cool to get to meet other synesthetes and learn about how they see words, sounds, and tastes, and how a lot of them incoroporate that into their daily life, or even their art! I will always be proud to be a synesthete, knowing that I get to see a rainbow every time I look at or even think about a simple bit of text!

If you’d like to know the color of your own name, either share this post on your feed or subscribe to my blog, and drop your name in the comments! Thanks for reading a little bit about me and this cool genetic phenomenon. May your day be as colorful as the words on this page!

P. S. Going through and color matching all these letters to physically represent what happens in my head was beautifully satisfying to see laid out in real text. This blog post may be the most visually satisfying thing I've ever seen in my life!

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