I See Red People
Musings on living with multiple types of synesthesia
You are Pandora, opening not a box, but an industrial storage facility when you choose to start a google search with “is it weird if”, but that is often my first step on journeys of discovery- self and otherwise. This essay relates to what I found when at around age fourteen, I logged onto one of my high school library’s desktops and asked the void “is it weird if letters and numbers have colors”. No question mark of course. It would be a few years before I had the courage to type “is it weird if letters and numbers have personalities”, but more on that later. The answer to the color question was, comfortingly and as you might have guessed; no, you experience synesthesia.
Synesthesia is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.”
Most of the example sentences have to do with the fact that no one has any reliable idea of what it’s really about, but a more encouraging one is ‘However, new research from Yale on synesthesia is now revealing that there is a complex interaction between the senses in the brain — an interaction that enables us to understand the world in a unified way.’ According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a place I look forward to losing a few nights of sleep to, more on ADHD in another essay), the roots of synesthesia come from the Greek: “syn” meaning “union” and “aesthesis” meaning “senses” so literally the union of senses. Surgery under synesthesia sounds like garbage.
In practical terms, common types of synesthesia include a cross wiring of sound and sight, such as seeing colors while hearing different musical notes or types of music.
Future Fiona Apple-esque-one brilliant album every twelve years- songstress Lorde has long discussed the connection between color and her music. My old classmate John, another brilliant musician, sees different colors for different timbres of music as oppose to melodies. Timbre, interestingly, is often described as tone color. A rather common type, the first one I noticed in myself, means that I see a color every time I see or think of a letter or number (primarily single digits but some multi digit numbers have unique colors), and mine also extends to days of the week, months, years and centuries or certain time periods such as the Middle Ages or the Enlightenment. While I have never heard David Lynch use the term synesthesia, he is often interviewed about the color and sounds in his films, and the way he describes his process strikes me very much as a way of making creative and practical use of a synesthetic experience. In a 2005 lecture at UC Berkeley (at the 1:20 mark), he said, “It’s the idea, if you go into a room, and it’s blue you say no, no, no, no, no, we’ve got to paint this room, and it’s becomes a kind of pink, a yellow pink, because that feels correct for the idea that you got […] and then it’s not yellow pink under sunlight, it’s yellow pink […] at dusk, just almost night. And the yellow pink looks a certain way, and that’s the mood you want. And then you get the sounds to go with that. And it goes like that, all based on the original idea[…] it’s not an intellectual overlay, it’s living inside the ideas and being true to them. […]The chef doesn’t make the fish, the chef says that’s a beautiful beautiful fish and then I’ll do what I can to make a beautiful meal out of that. It’s like that.” This whole statement struck me because he is really articulating how there is nothing inherently creative about synesthesia- you hear the sound, you see the color, you don’t invent anything. It’s completely up to you as to whether you want to bring that experience into the physical world and share it with others. Lynch’s films are often met with “that doesn’t make sense”, and he famously refuses to explain. It’s just a hunch but it seems to me that in his aesthetic and sonic choices he is simply drifting down the river of his own mind, and it’s his river, not ours, so it’s unsurprising that the audience doesn’t always follow. My A is red, my friend’s is blue, and we have to agree to disagree, even if just the thought of a blue A makes absolutely no sense to me.
Since this essay is the written equivalent of holding your friends and family hostage while you tell them about your craaaazy dream, I’ll describe how synesthesia manifests in me and provide a visual later on that hopefully gives a sense of what I see. Like listening to someone describe their dreams, it might only feel worthwhile to you if you were getting paid the big bucks to analyze this, but my current health insurance situation is not going to align with that. In short, when I think of a letter or number (and the other categories previously mentioned), it is painted strongly in an individual color. When I read it printed on the page it’s more like a filter of that color overlaid on whatever color the word is actually printed in, such as black in this article. I know it’s written in black, and that black is not exactly obscured, but somehow I still see the color- it isn’t a binary in perception.
My experience of synesthesia started as early as I can remember having an awareness of letters and numbers. Archeological findings from pilfering through my childhood notebooks reveal, among drawings of weirdly sexy characters from books I never ended up writing, sequences of letters and numbers where I was clearly trying to find the color of marker or crayon that best matched the color I saw: a red A, a dark brown B, a sky blue 3 etcetera. These were frustrated attempts because the marker was never quite the right color. I don’t remember writing these sequences at the time, but it seems to me now that I was trying to organize what I saw, to have physical proof of a vision or point of view that I must have worried might disappear. My synesthesia hasn’t disappeared, nor has it changed at all. The colors are all the same, what has changed though is my awareness of how wide this sense spreads across my life. Phenomenon much less categorizable than numbers, letters, months and days of the week are also flooded in color. A routine, a fight, a short period of time, or a certain friendship are each tinted. I notice the tint is stronger the more removed I am from the situation, as though when I can finally frame it as a memory, I can see what color it truly is. Now is the time to warn for incoming douchey overly specific color names- I will not apologize for activating the word chartreuse.
Kindergarten, especially circle time, is filtered by a tangerine color, with shimmers of raspberry red running through it.
The time a woman screamed in my face to give her my seat on the subway is shaded an almost identical orange but with dark purple running through it. I try not to dwell on the potential significance of that. Sometimes the colors seem to match well established links between emotions and colors, shameful memories dipped in a chartreuse and brown swirl, rosy ones being, well, rosy, but more often than not they don’t make any sense. There is nothing inherently powder blue and mouse brown about the path I used to walk between my first New York apartment and NYU’s campus, and yet that’s what it was. An experience, bracketed by time, blanketed in color.
Beyond color, the calendar year takes on a certain shape in my mind, for most people it’s an oval but for me it’s more of a rotating kidney bean, with the summer being slightly concave. Leave it to my brain to have the weirder version of the weird thing. A rarer group draws involuntary connections between sound and smell. We all know what the word “moist” smells like, and we send a prayer to those with this type. There are many more types of synesthesia that one can explore on the rather self explanatory website synesthesia.com. There are also meditations and various ways to supposedly help develop synesthesia though I can’t speak to their efficacy.
Hey Google, “is it weird if letters and numbers have personalities?”
The answer to this nervously typed question in my junior year of high school describes a rarer form of synesthesia called Ordinal Linguistic Personification. Because I was anticipating a haunting WebMD diagnosis it took me a while to pose this, but it is as simple as what I described in my question- an involuntary personification of the categories I’ve been describing. Side note: I don’t have a single word that defines letters, numbers, days of the week etcetera so I vacillate between calling them categories, entities, phenomenon, units- one day I’ll find the appropriate term. It’s perhaps important to specify that January has a personality all her own rather than being a combination of the personalities of J, A, N, U, A, R, and Y. These personalities are on a gender spectrum, but there are non-binary letters (F,L,W), numbers (1,9,0) days (Monday, Thursday), and a month (March). They also exist across race, age and sexuality spectrums. I might as well note that the Enlightenment, Friday, and the letter T are gay. Of course this leads to the obvious point that these perceptions are entirely individual, though A is often red among synesthetes, as it is for me, but like I mentioned with David Lynch’s experience, I never made a decision about who these things are or what colors, they just are. It’s also important to specify that it isn’t as though I know these units through and through as people, it’s more like I knew them in school and we don’t really talk anymore, but I can still identify their basic traits and characters, as well as a shady image of what they look like. For example, D is a tall sensitive brooding man, who one might wile away two years with before realizing that though he has Baudelaire memorized, he has never filed his taxes on time.
So what’s the point? Neuroscientists, philosophers, and mind wanderers like myself have spent endless hours researching, debating and contemplating the significance of synesthesia. There is no doubt that it appears more frequently among creative types, often with the same senses that are used in the person’s creative field, but the ultimate purpose of this experience is a question.
For me the biggest impact has been, what a surprise, how I perceive pretty much everything.
For better or for worse I project a lot onto people and things based on the information I get from my synesthesia. People’s names especially come with baggage, people’s home addresses, phone numbers, character names in books and media; it all results in my having a lot of opinions and assumptions about things that maybe don’t beg for an opinion. It also gives me a secret language that only I can decipher- I have no insecurity about sharing that my overly used password is a famous Van Gogh painting of sunflowers, written out in the letters and numbers that match the colors in the painting. Do I seem crazy? That’s for you to decide, but ultimately this perception or condition simply gives me more to contemplate and multiple levels on which to absorb new information. Modern attitudes often seek to turn any neurodivergence into a super power, perhaps in an effort to counteract the terrible history of abuse of anyone who processes differently but I don’t think synesthesia makes me particularly special and it certainly has not made me more efficient. I cling to psychologist Amos Tversky’s quote “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” Nailed it.
Still, I don’t see it as a limitation. My sense of this life is simultaneously specific and borderless, and I’ve come to appreciate those multi-colored layers in a world that is often so punishingly this or that.
Is my world more beautiful?
Well, to prove that I never consciously curated my synesthesia, you can take a look at my spectrum with the alphabet below. These are not the colors I would have chosen if I had the choice. So many odd neither here nor there warm colors! I prefer cooler colors, rich blues and purples, periwinkles, emerald greens… ah well. There are a few that fit into that, which I appreciate, but the overall look of the alphabet leaves something to be desired. Same thing with digits- 3 is my only blue! And it’s not even a great blue! I digress.
What is irritating is the opacity of the colors- it doesn’t perfectly visualize the experience. As I said before, it is more of a filter of colored light superimposed on the word or digit, but oh well! Now you know what your name looks like to me.
I won’t write out a personality description for each of these things because we’ll be here all day and it’s taken me so long to write this I’ve gone through the full journey of “this is a great idea- this is an okay idea- this is a terrible idea- and back around to, well I better just finish it and get it out there”, but if you are interested in knowing the impression I get of your name, comment it below and I’d be happy to tell you. Hopefully you have lots of repeat letters in your name… Annnnna?
