Feb 21
one thing they don't tell you about synesthesia is that you'll accidentally be writing f instead of 4 and 4 instead of f for multiple years straight because they're both green
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one thing they don't tell you about synesthesia is that you'll accidentally be writing f instead of 4 and 4 instead of f for multiple years straight because they're both green
A new paper about how people with synesthesia map colours onto vowels. Abstract:
We report associations between vowel sounds, graphemes, and colors collected online from over 1,000 Dutch speakers.
We also provide open materials, including a Python implementation of the structure measure and code for a single-page web application to run simple cross-modal tasks. We also provide a full dataset of color–vowel associations from 1,164 participants, including over 200 synesthetes identified using consistency measures. Our analysis reveals salient patterns in the cross-modal associations and introduces a novel measure of isomorphism in cross-modal mappings.
We found that, while the acoustic features of vowels significantly predict certain mappings (replicating prior work), both vowel phoneme category and grapheme category are even better predictors of color choice. Phoneme category is the best predictor of color choice overall, pointing to the importance of phonological representations in addition to acoustic cues.
Generally, high/front vowels are lighter, more green, and more yellow than low/back vowels. Synesthetes respond more strongly on some dimensions, choosing lighter and more yellow colors for high and mid front vowels than do nonsynesthetes.
We also present a novel measure of cross-modal mappings adapted from ecology, which uses a simulated distribution of mappings to measure the extent to which participants’ actual mappings are structured isomorphically across modalities. Synesthetes have mappings that tend to be more structured than nonsynesthetes’, and more consistent color choices across trials correlate with higher structure scores.
Nevertheless, the large majority (~ 70%) of participants produce structured mappings, indicating that the capacity to make isomorphically structured mappings across distinct modalities is shared to a large extent, even if the exact nature of the mappings varies across individuals. Overall, this novel structure measure suggests a distribution of structured cross-modal association in the population, with synesthetes at one extreme and participants with unstructured associations at the other.
Read the whole paper (open access) or read a summary as a twitter thread.
That's cool! My favourite is like 2s coz they're a pretty yellow, what about letters? Do you see the same colours in letters as numbers or are they different, for me they're the same so C and 2 are the same colour
I made this post on my main blog about what I see like 6 years ago: http://geomagics.tumblr.com/post/12075852401/how-my-brain-sees-grapheme-colour-synesthesia
Nothing has changed since then ^_^
blamemarktjan answered your question “I have synesthesia, the kind where I personify numbers (and letters),...”
It's called Grapheme-Colour Synesthesia, and while it's not common, it's probably what you're experiencing. Letters/numbers being strongly associated with lines probably explains the other part. :)
That has to do with colour though, doesn’t it? I know I have Ordinal-linguistic personification, but could the lines be connected to grapheme-colour synesthesia instead? ??
Also, thank you for answering! But this does make me think it is connected to synesthesia more now. :>
Someone’s done the cross-linguistic synesthesia writing system study that I was speculating about a couple months ago! This study features grapheme-colour synesthetes who were trilingual in Korean, English, and Japanese. Here’s the abstract:
Individuals with grapheme-color synesthesia experience idiosyncratic colors when viewing achromatic letters or digits. Despite large individual differences in grapheme-color association, synesthetes tend to associate graphemes sharing a perceptual feature with similar synesthetic colors. Sound has been suggested as one such feature. In the present study, we investigated whether graphemes of which representative phonemes have similar phonetic features tend to be associated with analogous synesthetic colors. We tested five Korean multilingual synesthetes on a color-matching task using graphemes from Korean, English, and Japanese orthography. We then compared the similarity of synesthetic colors induced by those characters sharing a phonetic feature. Results showed that graphemes associated with the same phonetic feature tend to induce synesthetic color in both within- and cross-script analyses. Moreover, this tendency was consistent for graphemes that are not transliterable into each other as well as graphemes that are. These results suggest that it is the perceptual—i.e., phonetic—properties associated with graphemes, not just conceptual associations such as transliteration, that determine synesthetic color.
The study is open-access and available in full here.
This is how I see the alphabet!
So I've been reading all the recent posts about synesthesia and mismatch reactions, and I was wondering - does that mismatch aversion make reading blocks of single-colored text uncomfortable, or is it only a thing with individually presented graphemes?
I've never heard of a synesthete who was bothered by plain old black-on-white (although hey, if you exist, feel free to tell me!) and I'd say in general blocks of mono-coloured text in unremarkable colours are fine for me, or if a header or link text are in an accent colour then I don't really notice if I'm not thinking about it. (Although if I'm choosing colours I'll probably make them match.) I'm not a huge fan of blocks of bright-coloured or light-on-dark text but I think that's just me finding them hard to read, not synesthesia.
For individual letters, I'll always show a preference to make them match my colours as close as possible, but I can generally kind of deal with/ignore the colours with something like a Happy Birthday banner that has each letter a different colour when they don't match mine. (This may bug other synesthetes more though.)
The worst thing for me is, in discussions of synesthesia, when I'm already trying to be really conscious of my colours instead of just letting them float by automatically, to then have something else that jumps in and jars them. So other synesthetes are generally very apologetic when I mention that naming colour associations is annoying in the same way that letters-in-mismatched-colours is annoying, because they totally get it. But impersonal websites and such that explain synesthesia by giving demos are terrible, because on the one hand I'm totally fascinated by this neurological quirk I have, but on the other hand most explanations of it have some parts I've learned to quickly avert my eyes from. But at least I know what I'm stepping into when I click on something about synesthesia. If I weren't so interested in it, I could probably avoid being bothered altogether.
On mismatching synesthesiac colours
jazzmoth
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More on synesthesia
oh no, i’m so sorry! i only wince when i SEE the colors mismatched, i didn’t consider that it could happen when you hear about others. :( :( MANY APOLOGIES. :( :(
No worries, I knew that the notes on that post were going to be a potential trouble spot for me so I was skimming them anyway. In retrospect, it probably would have made more sense to put my t colour association below a warning/explanation in the original post which would have prevented the whole thing, but I didn't realize we were going to end up in a long conversation about synesthesia!
But more interestingly, we now have at least three possible levels of reaction to mismatched synesthesiac colours that I'm aware of:
1. Seeing graphemes written in the wrong colour ink. 2. Seeing written descriptions of graphemes referring to the wrong colours. 3. Hearing descriptions of graphemes referring to the wrong colours.
All 3 bother me, it appears that only (1) bothers jazzmoth, and I think (1) and (2) but not (3) bother another synesthete that I know but I'm going to link them to this post when it's up and ask (I'm specifically wondering about (2) as I know (1) is bad and (3) is fine for this person). [Update: Nope, only (1) bothers my sister, and only at "slightly annoying" levels. Also, she's a projector. (And says it's fine for me to mention these things.)]
As a guess, I wonder whether it has to do with whether one is a projector or an associator. I'm an associator, and I seem to wince with any kind of mismatched association, whereas perhaps projectors only wince for mismatched writing specifically.
Some synaesthetes state that they see the colors of letters with their "mind's eye". These people are known as "association-synaesthetes". However, about 10% of synaesthestes, state that they perceive colors as if they are projected directly onto the letter on the page. Such synesthetes are known as "projector-synaesthetes" (Source, but be warned it has coloured symbols.)
Or we could just all have this reaction to mismatch!
majesticroyaldick replied to your post “More on synesthesia”
Haha, I experience similar discomfort when I hear what other people's associations are but I'm rather masochistic about it, maybe I'm just used to arguing with my sister about ours.