What colour is the letter A? Are the days of the week or months of the year located in particular positions for you? Do certain musical notes have colours or textures? Synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon where certain senses or concepts cross over into other ones, and it's probably more common than people realize.
What colour is the letter A? Are the days of the week or months of the year located in particular positions for you? Do certain musical notes have colours or textures? Synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon where certain senses or concepts cross over into other ones, and it's probably more common than people realize.
In this episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about synesthesia! We talk about research on various kinds of synesthesia, including the much-studied grapheme-colour, sound-colour, and time-space synesthesias, as well as rarer varieties such as Gretchen's attitude-texture synesthesia which she's never heard of anyone else having. Also, our producer Claire realized she was actually a synesthete while editing this episode! This is...not the first time something like this has happened to us, so if you discover the same, we'd love to hear your stories!
Content note for synesthetes: This episode talks about the general phenomenon of letters and numbers having colours but it doesn't talk about specific mappings of symbol to colour, e.g. "the colour of A" or "letters that are green" but not "$Letter/$Word is $Colour" as we know this creates painful cognitive dissonance for some synesthetes (including one of us!). We'd ask that people also refrain from naming specific colour mappings in the comments here; to do it in the Discord please use spoiler tags |like this| so people can opt-in to seeing them or not.
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Also, we know that this is a rough time for everyone these days. We want to reassure you that Lingthusiasm is already a distributed, internet-based project so we'll be continuing to put out our regular episodes and bonus episodes which don't talk about news or current events and are hopefully a nice distraction for you. If you're looking for other breaks from the social media news cycle, we're also really enjoying the community that's growing in the Lingthusiasm Discord. By request, we've recently started experimenting in Discord with doing livestream listen-alongs of new episodes and play-alongs of linguistics-related video games, if you'd like some linguistics community events to keep you company. We've also started an email newsletter called Mutual Intelligibility where we summarize resources available on various linguistics topics for teaching or self-teaching.
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