It turned out that I had food poisoning. While it was certainly an experience to say the least, the episode is more notable for being the first time I ever verbalized a strange phenomenon I have lived with every since I can remember—synesthesia.
While many of you reading this now know exactly what I am talking about and probably live with it yourselves, I’m guessing the majority of you might just assume from what I’m about to describe that I must be crazy or tripping on psychedelic substances. Rather, the truth is that my sensory perception is a little haywire.
Synesthesia is a neurological occurrence in which stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to an automatic and involuntary experience in a second sensory pathway. For example, some people can see sounds (“C-sharp is a soft, warm red”) or taste words (“‘Sofa’ is kind of … smoky”). My situation is a little different. I see letters, words and numbers in different colors (grapheme-color synesthesia), experience letters, numbers, days of the week and months of the year as different genders and personalities (ordinal linguistic personification) and view numbers, months of year, and days of the week as being situated in specific locations in space (spatial-sequence or number form synesthesia). I don’t taste things or smell things I’m not supposed to by nature, but (obviously) pain elicits specific visual responses in my mind’s eye. (Another example: breathing too much air into my lungs is frosty blue and patterned like bricks or bubbles).
It is very difficult for someone with my condition to articulate the specifics of what goes on inside my head. People who do not have it cannot imagine such a thing occurring. Even writing this article is a bit uncomfortable for me because it’s almost embarrassing to have to explain that I see time three-dimensionally in a humongous circular ribbon in space. Heck, even I think it’s freaky.
But it’s always been that way for me. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t see the number five as blue, didn’t know that M (a pinkish red) is a bossy female who always tries to keep her rebellious sister N (an orangey red) in tow, and didn’t visualize Saturday as a 90 degree right turn from Friday on a map of the week inside my mind. However, I, like many synesthetes, kept these experiences a secret for most of my life, mostly because it is not something I had the language to talk about. Can you imagine an eight-year-old going up to her grandma and asking him if E is as insecure as she appears to be or if April is supposed to be directly across from September on a gigantic circle inside her head? If I had done that, I would have just gotten a patronizing, “What an imagination you’ve got, Robby-bob! Why don’t you go write a story about it?”
You see, I just assumed that either everyone in the world experienced these oddities and didn’t talk about it or no one else did and that I was the only one. It wasn’t until the food poisoning incident that I realized something was amiss. Although I had read about synesthesia in science magazines, I didn’t think it applied to me because my perception of sound, taste and smell is almost never affected. However, I have since discovered that synesthesia is much more complicated and nuanced than just hearing the color orange and smelling the tasting the word “prickly.”
Grapheme-color synesthesia is the most commonly reported version of the condition. People with it involuntarily and consistently experience letters and numbers as different colors. While some may look at a page and see text in rainbow, others like me visualize individual letters and numbers projected in space as their designated hues. For example, I can look at a document and see the words in black, but if I think of a specific character, such as R, I see it inside my head as a plum violet. Still, it’s more than just seeing the violet—I know it’s violet, and that color has never changed since I learned the alphabet.
Part of this phenomenon is my experience of names, colors and even people as colors. Yes, individual people have colors as well, but please don’t assume I mean I can sense people’s “auras.” Rather, these colors are usually based on the colors of names. For example, my Uncle Michael is red. Just … red. This is because the words “Uncle Michael” are red and this, in turn, occurs because of M’s inherent redness—although, strangely, singular M and words beginning with M are usually completely separate shades of the color. However, this is not always the case. While W is gray, the word “Why” is orange. Go figure.
Ordinal linguistic personification, probably the strangest of my three versions of the condition, causes people to assign genders and personalities to letters, numbers, days and months. There is not much known about this form of synesthesia, as researchers have virtually ignored it, but it has been documented for over 100 years. In my case, these personification characteristics are so ingrained in me that I can list the genders of numbers 1 to 100 without hesitation. 1 is a girl, 2 is a boy, 3 is a boy, 4 is a girl, 5 is a boy, 6 is a girl, 7 is a boy, 8 is a boy, 9 is a boy, 10 is a girl, 11 is a girl … and so on. The same goes for letters (A is a girl, B is a boy, C is a boy … ), days (Friday is a girl, Saturday and Sunday are boys … ) and months (April and May are girls, June and July are boys … ). You get the point.
This gender assigning isn’t so weird compared to the fact that each of these entities has a personality to boot. Love triangles are popular with my letters and numbers. Four is a young, naive teenage girl in love with the older boy, 5, but he, in turn, has a thing for sexy, young adult 6 (who just so happens to have a thing with confident 7.) In the alphabet chronicles, insecure R is love with the tall, dark, and handsome T (who is happily dating sultry S), but he might one day develop feelings for R. We’ll just have to wait and see. It gets stranger. G is married to H and their child is I. Eight is self-conscious about his weight. W is a sagacious, grandfatherly type. 3 is still an immature little kid, A is a tomboyish, dominant female and X, Y, and Z are a threesome of bachelor buds. Think this is just a result of an overactive imagination? Think again.
Number form synesthesia invokes a visuo-spatial mental map of numbers and measurements of time in those with the condition. These maps are involuntary, automatic, and consistent—I have experienced them for as long as I’ve understood numbers, months of the year, days of the week, and hours of the day. When I think of numbers, I literally see a line in my head—a zigzagging line of consecutive numbers from one to infinity, 1 appearing at the bottom left of the “space” and anything after it traveling upward and right along the way. This line is very similar to the one I see for years—2008 residing at the top right, and anything before it along a diagonal and squiggling line towards the bottom left. If I focus on a particular number or year my mind’s eye can “zoom” to that place. For example, when I read that George Washington lived from 1732 to 1799, my mind can immediately zoom in to see the chunk of years of his life on the grand timeline of my mind. This ability is especially useful for making comparisons and remembering dates.
Months are a little different. As I’ve explained before, they come together as a large-scale, three-dimensional, circular belt and each has its own corresponding color (July is an aquamarine, September is red, etc.) When we are in a particular month, I am “in” that month. My inner vision follows the passing of time, meaning that since we are in April, my perspective rests in April, and if I think of October, my inner “self” must turn right to see the giant red written “SEPTEMBER” behind “me.” It’s as though I am encircled by twelve colored billboards that have never changed their locations since I learned about time as a child. I suppose I should view this experience as “weird,” but since I’ve never known any different, it’s actually pretty mundane to me.
Studies indicate that there is a correlation between synesthesia and creativity. Indeed, it seems that some of the most notably creative people in history might have been synesthetes—including Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, American composer Leonard Bernstein and American musician Duke Ellington. Synesthesia is a gift of a neurological condition, as bizarrely as it may manifest in the individual, and I don’t regret for one that I experience it. Who wants to be normal anyway?