FE203Girl....Nope, it's not inconvenient most of the time. In fact, it can help serve as a mnenomic device, i.e. I remember it's "Katherine" with a "K" because I remember her name is reddish. Sometimes I can mix things up however between letters that have similar colors. For instance, "L" and "P" are close to the same color (tho "L" is slightly brighter and a bit more yellowish), and several years ago I was living at the YWCA for about a month and the mail boxes had alphabetic combinations. Numeric combinations are easy because of the 10 digits, almost every one has a distinctive color, but in the case of letters, I couldn't keep it in my head whether a certain letter was supposed to be "L" or "P". That is because I was remembering more the color pattern than the letters individually.
I'd heard of the condition, but I only thought it was something that happened to people who take "certain substances" for recreational purposes.
Not at all. I am certain there are several other synesthetes on this board, tho I bet some never knew there was a name for what they've experienced all their lives. I had no idea what it was called until the late '90s.
Leolaia, is there any danger involved in having sensory areas that "interfere" with each other. Or is it just something that people are used to, like colour blindness?
Well, usually for me it's not that vivid unless I pay attention to it. And the really super-vivid projective experiences are comparatively rare compared to the everyday latent experience. When it is vivid, the colors, shapes, etc. are seen as phantom images and phantom colors...they are different in essence from real colors or shapes so you'd never confuse the two (as opposed to what happens in hallucinations). There are two similar things I can mention to describe it. Have you ever dreamt in color? I mean, where the colors are really vivid and unmistakable. But yet this mental color is just not the same as the real thing. Or have you had a really intense visual experience over an extended period of time and then later when you go to bed you see phantom images of what you experienced projected by your mind? Such as playing a video game all day for hours on end and then when you go to bed you literally see images of the game playing by itself (i.e. see them with your eyes)? Another experience I had was the millenium New Years, in which I saw fireworks everywhere around me for hours on end, and then when I went to bed I could still see with my eyes a little red one go off or a green one. That's what synesthesia looks like when it is vivid. Except usually it is perceived on a more subconcious level until I focus on it. I've had experiences in which I picked up synesthetic responses on a subconcious level and only gradually became aware of it and then realize what was triggering the responses (i.e. like when something resembles the shape of an alphabet letter or number).
I think that many people have certain crossovers between senses in their brain that can temporarily cause them to see music/taste colours but I think part of the criteria to be diagnosed with synesthesia is that your misfiring connections are consistent eg. If the number 11 is always a bright red, if a flat square object always tastes bitter etc
Exactly. I have noticed very gradual long-term drift (i.e. "W" is more green than it was 15 years ago, when I first wrote a list of my colors), but the associations are the same minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, year-by-year. However, there can be variation in my music perception, because there are different stimulis (i.e. timbre, pitch, structure of melodies, etc.) which each have their own associations, so music can look depending on what aspect of the music I'm paying attention to. Also, there can be bleed-throughs of my graphemic syn into the music syn, i.e. the song title.
