#conceptual synesthesia

@robbed-ghost this is probably not what you were thinking, but it's here, and I wrote it, and it was difficult. I wanna know what your experience with color is, though. Does your brain make up shades that can't possibly exist as well?

The Colors in My Head are not Colors You Can See

The first time she realized something was different was in third grade.

"Color these shapes how you think they should be colored."

The lesson was in color association. She was so excited. She did it wrong.

The square was supposed to be red. But squares were not red! They were...

Something else.

Red, but green, but brown, but orange, but not any of those colors. All and none. They were smooth, but the diamonds weren't smooth. But coloring in the diamond with yellow criss-crossing lines was "lazy." Not coloring the square at all was "lazy."

"Just color it the color you think it should be."

"But the color it is isn't in my pencil box!"

"Then mix some colors to get the one you want."

But they didn't understand! It wasn't an outside color, it was an inside color! Her pencils didn't have the inside colors!

She colored the square red.

"Why is your science folder pink? Science is green!"

"No, science is purple!"

"Blue!"

"What do you think? Science is pink, right?"

No. Science was orange-green-purple-white.

"It's yellow."

She smiled at the chaos. Science was not yellow. That much seemed to be a point they could all agree on.

The same five notes played over and over in her head. A month, and no one had been able to figure out what song it was.

Apparently, "green and gray and matte and cylindrical" was not an adequate description.

The song was "Nothing Else Matters." That was why she couldn't think of it. The rest of the song was shiny and orange. A beveled rectangular prism.

She had spent almost a year thinking of green and gray and matte cylinders.

"Think of your favorite smell," the yoga teacher instructed. "Imagine that scent. Smell it."

She tried. Her favorite smell was fresh basil. She smelled green and brown and blue-orange. She smelled rounded edges, tiered steps, a two-dimensional egg shape comprised of three-dimensional structures, like atoms made of molecules.

It was not relaxing.

"Synesthesia is a condition that stems from increased communication between sensory regions in the brain. People with synesthesia might experience sound as color, taste as physical touch, or even complex mathematical concepts as shapes in their mind's eye."

Synesthesia?

"While the word 'condition' carries negative connotations, many people with synesthesia wouldn't give it up for the world. It would be like taking away one of our senses. It affects the way they interpret the world, how their brain works. Many of the greatest minds in many different fields have been synesthetes."

Synesthesia. What a wonderful word. Yellow and soft, with underlying pastel rainbows and gentle spikes.

You’ll see a lot of online handles (usernames, I guess is what most people call them -- handle is a holdover from the BBS days I grew up in) with numbers after them because the word or combination of words or name or whatever was already taken.

I’ve never been good at choosing that kind of name, when I’ve wanted one, but now I’ve found a simple trick.  This only works if you have both colored letters and colored numerals -- or some other synesthetic trait tied to letters and numbers where the two can be easily compared.  But I’m going to describe this in terms of color because that’s how mine works.

Take the word that I wanted to start with.

Look at the colors of each letter in the word (or the whole word, if you want to go that way and if the color is different for whole words -- but it’s easier with individual letters).

Then, for each letter, choose the closest match in numbers to that color.  It doesn’t have to be an exact match.  Just the closest match you can find.  If there’s no possible even remotely close match, skip that letter (or use an underscore or dash or some other symbol you’ve chosen to represent a blank spot) and keep going.

So like... Amelia

A is blue, M is red, E is green, L is transparent-ish (but has weird properties with regards to the letters it’s next to in a word, sometimes), I is white, A is blue.

That’s all the detail you need -- there are far fewer numbers than letters, so you want the possibilities as broad as possible, even though you of course will have specific shades of each color in mind, and possibly properties like shininess roughness and personality and etc.

So:

0 is black, 1 is white, 2 is yellow, 3 is red, 4 is blue, 5 is sort of an olive brown(1), 6 is orangish brownish but more on the orange side of things, 7 is on the slightly more blue side of a medium-light purple/lavender, 8 is green (a hard one to pin down because it glows and things like that always throw me off), 9 is another reddish-orangeish-brown but more on the brown side this time, and that’s all the numerals.

AMELIA = 438_14 or 43814

So then your handle can be amelia43814 or something like amelia438_14 depending on your preference -- and you will have a much easier time remembering it than you would some random number.  Never mind that the red of M is more a dark brick-red and the red of C is more a brighter candy-red -- they’re still similar enough that they’re easy for me to remember as going together.  So you’re far less likely to forget such a username than you would if you used random numbers, and you don’t have to reveal any personal information like birth year unless you want to (a lot of people I’ve noticed, have online handles like Ashley1983 -- if you don’t want the entire world to instantly know your age without even asking, that may not be the best choice).

And again, if letters and numbers have some attribute other than color that you’re capable of using instead, go for it.  It’s just colors are the most common form of conceptual grapheme-related synesthesia (personality and visual texture, I’d imagine, would be close behind).

(1) I’ve gotten in trouble for saying “olive green” and “dog turd brown” to describe the same color, the color of five -- someone decided I must be lying(2), even though I’ve taken part in synesthesia genetics research that requires you pass tests proving it’s real synesthesia.  

But to me those are two shades of the same color, and someone had once described a color within that shade-system for me as “olive green” so I just assumed such a description would apply to all colors in that area, which include certain greens, browns, dark yellows, and dark beiges.  Also there are olives and dog turds that definitely share the same colors -- both in areas considered green and areas considered brown.  

My having my own designations for where colors cut off is sort of like my having my own designations for different types of pain, some of which I would never imagine could all be under the same umbrella-wod “pain”, some of which  I would never imagine other people see as separate.  Where people draw distinctions between certain sensory experiences can be both cultural and personal.  My mother has certain turquoise-like shades where she never knows whether to say it’s blue or green, not because she can’t tell the various shades apart (both she and I have passed with 100% accuracy a very hard test of differentiating minute differences in color, so we obviously didn’t catch the colorblindness that runs in the family) but because she divides up the borders of certain colors in a way that is unique to her.

(2) This person was bent out of shape about me for all kinds of reasons, some better than others, but I can’t stand people who, instead of being honest and saying “I just don’t like you,” instead habitually try to pick at and find fault with people about things like changes in the way they described the color of “5″ when they were just learning how to describe colors of that sort..  That, to me, crosses an ethical line.  All of us cross lines like that from time to time.  It’s painfully (or perhaps, much more dangerous -- painlessly) easy to believe ill of someone you don’t like, and that bias can creep into your thoughts without even trying.  

But IMO it’s everyone’s job to at least try and behave ethically in situations like these.  Because the cost to your personal enemies may be higher than you intend it to be.  And even if you did intend such harm... that’s a serious sign you need to change some things about how you deal with disliking people.  Because this sort of thing can easily lead to obsession, stalking, bullying, and other negative behavior towards others.  It’s the same reason most little kids have to be taught not to just haul off and smack someone they don’t like.  What this person did was the verbal equivalent of whacking me upside the head because I was playing with hir favorite toy.