I was browsing the intertubes when this video popped up from our Great British TV show QI. It talks about Synaesthesia, which if my rather rushed ‘research’ on Wikipedia tells me, is when people imagine a secondary image when presented with something else.
What’s talked about in that video is colour synaesthesia, which is where people associate things with different colours relating to their emotions and feelings. It’s a sort of knee-jerk reaction to being fed information. It isn’t thought consciously, but rather one of those things in the back of the mind – like when you know something isn’t a good idea by that gut feeling you get.
These people can see numbers as having a ‘heat’, per se. The numbers have a certain feel to them, which allows them to spot different numbers easily. In this example, it was noted that the first 12 digits go in a clockwise loop, noting it as a possible external skill.
OLP – or Ordinal-linguistic personification – allows people with this to assign personalities to letters. Like most people would associate a sound like a smashing sound to be with danger, synaesthetes associate characters with personalities. Things like “K is a feminine, quiet character, while J is a manly man’s character” are quite common amongst these people.
So do you think you have synaesthesia? There’s a test called a Stroop test which you may have taken anyway when playing a game like the obviously titled Click The Colour And Not The Word. Thing is, synaesthetes would struggle more at this if the word was an opposite colour to what they associate the letters that make it up with, but they would be unphased if it matched up.
Studies have found on variations of that test, people with synaesthesia tend to do well when, for example, mathematical problems are colour coded as they see them, rather than in opposing colours. In simple reactions tests, there’s a good 50% variation in the amount of correct answers given by synaesthetes rather than those who didn’t have it.
Thing is, it’s thought to be in about 1 in 23 people globally, so you may very well have it. But just out of interest, what colour do you see Monday as?
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