The Color of Seven

Thanks to Jemima, whose color wheel completely rules, and Natasha, who betaed my code, I have now posted a schematic of my numbers and letters. What's this all about, you may ask? Synaesthesia, that's what it's about. As I mentioned when I began this blog, I am a cognitive synaesthete -- that is, my numbers and letters are irrevocably associated with certain colors, which I see in my mind whenever I think about text, or look at it in print. Like many synaesthetes, I didn't know this was an actual phenomenon until a few years ago; until then, I thought it was merely idiosyncratic. Now, I keep finding fellow synaesthetes everywhere; Virginia is one, and I discovered today that Natasha is one too. We discussed our various colors, and discovered that our vowels matched almost exactly! This is interesting, because the inborn associations between colors and letters often vary greatly from synaesthete to synaesthete. I remembered reading somewhere that there was some study being done on the percentage of color-grapheme associations; I can't find it now, but as I recall the most common commonality was an association between red and the letter A. My A is more of an orange-vermilion color, as you can see from the schematic.

Of course, the difficulty about having such an interesting brain is that it presents a temptation to some serious navel-gazing. But I will be shameless today. I mean, what else is a blog for? But if it interests you, check out the synaesthesia webring linked above; there are some fascinating facts out there, as well as a teeming plethora of schematics like mine.

UPDATE: Found a page with Sean Day's research results from an inquiry into colored letter trends among synaesthetes. Eeen-teresting.