#grapheme-colour synesthesia

[ungenerichuman]

Salutations, I wanna talk about my synesthesia.

- First off, what is it?

Synesthesia is when your senses are linked. So, for example, some people see colours when they hear sounds. Others, taste things when they see colours, and much more. There are many m a n y types of synesthesia and it's really interesting to look into, also remember that everyone's is different so if I say B is dark blue, someone else might say it's red. It can sometimes spark debates.

- What type do I have?

I have Grapheme-colour and ordinal linguistic personification synesthesia. This means that letters, numbers, words and things have colours in my mind. Ordinal linguistic personification means that some of my letters and numbers have genders or descriptions. OLP comes in many different variations and mine is only for a couple things, others have it for everything :)

- Associative or Projective?

I have associative synesthesia, so I don't actually see the colours in front of me, I just know that the thing has that colour. For example, I don't see "A" as dark green physically, but to me it's almost like a fact that it is. Projective is when you can see the colours in your "minds eye." like they're obviously there, rather than just associated.

- Examples (These are really random choices)

"Y" Y is a magenta colour, they are afab nonbinary (I apologise for the specification of agab) and odd.

"5" 5 is a light cyan-ish blue female, she's an old lady who's slightly snobby and has short white curly hair.

"X" X is white, agender, and quite a gothic person. Friends with "Z"

"7" 7 is orange and nonbinary

- Why did I say this

I don't know, but if anyone sees this and wants to ask the colour of their name then go ahead! I love doing it :D

(Be aware that other people may not want to be asked all the time and that everyone's answer will be different, I personally just like doing it)

[lingthusiasm]

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.

Announcements:

Remember to apply for the LingComm Grant if you have a public linguistics project you could use some support with!  

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.

Listen to the synesthesia bonus episode and get access to 37 more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. 

[cirrus-grey]

Me: 4 o'clock should be asexual hour! It's purple like the flag! I can't believe no one's ever thought of this before!

Me, five minutes later: Oh wait....

[justwhumpythings]

Grapheme-colour synesthesia ask meme:

Send me your name, url or another word and I’ll make an illustration of what colour I perceive it as!

[justwhumpythings]

elliot?

[justwhumpythings]

silas, for the grapheme-synesthesia thing?

[cirrus-grey]

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

0123456789

Not enough colors for all the letters and numbers, but better than monotone.