Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Synaesthasia

I just found out that a girl in my workshop has synaesthasia. We asked her why she used British spellings of things like colour and honour and she said "My u's are yellow." What?? Synaesthasia is a neurological disorder where your senses get crossed. Some people, like Julie, see letters as colors. Her u's are always yellow, her whole life. Each letter is a whole different color. Isn't that trippy?? Some people taste shapes or hear flavors or feel sounds.
Some of the articles I've been obsessively reading say that 10% of people have this sensory disorder. That means an equal number of people taste shapes as are left handed. The articles also agree that synaesthates are more likely to be writers or artists and one even suggested that this disorder changes the way synaesthates process mathematical equations and things. A person who sees numbers as colors, for example, can remember long strings of numbers (phone numbers, pi) and also might be able to see solutions to complex equations based on color patterns!
I want to know everything about this. I wish Julie would write her next essay for workshop about it because this is the most fascinating thing I've ever heard of. I want to know how she discovered she had it and others don't. I want to see a colored alphabet in her version. I want to somehow program MS Word so each letter of text is a different color so I can see how crazy it is to read in technocolor. I'm so fascinated.

1 comment:

PeaceLoveMath said...

"Synaesthesia is a common effect of some hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD or mescaline." - from wikipedia's entry on the topic

obviously, you should go find some LSD so that you can experience synaesthesia like you want to! hehehehe.