What colour is middle C?

I'm absolutely floored!  I had no idea!  A few blogs back I wrote about how my friend and I see things in colour.  I didn't really go on to explain how years, months, weeks and days have colours and patterns as well.  It's not something you really share with people.  It took me a long time to figure out that what I did was not the norm.  After writing this blog I was informed about something called Synesthesia.  My friend and I immediately started researching it.

Synesthesia is a neurologically based sydrome where one sense unconsciously triggers another.  There are a lot of different forms of this, but the most common is Grapheme.  This is where a person sees numbers and letters in colours.  It can also come in a numbered form where dates and such can have an actual location.  When I put both of these together I can see in my head where Thursday is located and that it's peach.  This may sound so weird to you, but it can get far more complicated!  Some people see colours with sound/music or taste things when words or names are mentioned.  I was also told today of someone who gives letters and numbers a gender and personality.  I must mention that this is involuntary.  It just happens.

There are some pieces of criteria to see if you are a synesthetes.

1. Synesthesia is involuntary and automatic
2. Synesthetic perceptions are spatially extended, meaning they often have a sense of "location." For example, synesthetes speak of "looking at" or "going to" a particular place to attend to the experience.
3. Synesthetic percepts are consistent and generic (i.e., simple rather than pictorial).
4. Synesthesia is highly memorable
5. Synesthesia is laden with affect.

If you are having trouble understanding let me give you an example. Patt Duffy explains learning to write: “I realized that to make an R all I had to do was first write a P and then draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line." Another describes is like this,  "When Valdimir Nabokov, a famous Russian novelist, was a toddler, the colored letters on his wooden blocks irritated him because they were the wrong colors." Now it makes sense why Sarah and I immediately knew that a red van could not be named Carol since Carol is yellow.  This also aids in people's creative process ... that might explain our crazy imaginations and creative proformances.

If you think I'm crazy, that's okay.  This has been around for a long time and went through intense scientific study in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

This is not considered a disorder or anything like that because it doesn't hinder how you function from day to day and most people report that it only enhances their life.  I would agree with this.  I think it helps my imagination and may even help me be organized.  The thing that interests me is that it runs in families.  I can't help but wonder if there is any connection between it and autism, but I didn't find anything in my research linking the two together.  The way that Tee moves and senses music makes me wonder if she has sound colour synesthesia.

I read that 1 in 90 have coloured Grapheme so statistically speaking Sarah and I are probably the only ones who read my blog who have this.  Although, they say that as many as 1 in 25 have some form of Synesthesia. If you have any or heard of any of the other kinds I'd love to hear about it.