SYNAESTHESIA - MY MUTANT POWER
Synaesthesia is a condition that is best described by its Chinese characters: "Mixed Senses." I see letters, numbers, days of the week, months, and many other things in colours in my mind's eye. Sometimes it may distract me but I'd never give it up if I had a choice. It's actually made some things easier, like memorising pi, and may have led me to become a passionate learner of new world languages with different character sets. They don't gain colour until I learn what they mean!
Recently, I found that I also see colours with music, which I noticed because the colours in Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G Minor are so different from each other (see Music section for a visual representation I created). My dad wrote an entertaining blog article on Radiohead, Syneaesthesia, and The Mutants Among Us.
These are some examples of my colourful inner world.
Studies
"Grapheme-Color Synaesthesia in English-Speaking Learners of Chinese" by Allison Kirkegaard
I couldn't believe my eyes when my mom texted this photo looking for synaesthetes studying Chinese to participate in a study at Pomona College. Believe it or not, there actually was another participant in the study too. It was so much fun to take the computerised test and discuss synaesthesia with the student who ran the study, who was also herself a synaesthete! The most interesting finding was that for me, characters have a neutral colour until I understand them. It's also interesting that the components of the characters each have their own colour depending on their shape, how they're said, or what they mean.
I also participated in a follow-up study a couple of years later (I was the only participant this time), but it hasn't been published yet. Allison was happy to share all of the data with me so I can help research, write up, and finalise the paper with her next year.
