What's the color of numbers??

I have been walking around with this for a while and i know i've seen a study about this on NGC or Discovery, i believe.
But it seems some people can make a connection between things that are absolutly not connected. For instance there are people who can see what color a certain song has or how the number 6 smells....

I know, it sounds weird.....

I was just wondering if there are people (if think everybody has this) who make certain correlations between things that are not connected.

I'll go first,
i always get the feeling that the number 4, the color red and the letter A belong together....it just feels right!!
Same with the combination 3, green and G.
(i also believe number two is yellow but i'm getting no letter with that one)

In my case it's only numbers, letters and colors but it can be anything. Just wondering how you are all seeing the world.

I'll be hearing from you.

Peace

(ps: no i don't do drugs and i haven't been drinking.... )

[edit on 11/2/2009 by operation mindcrime]

Sounds like you're talking about synesthesia.

Here's a link from MIT: The Synesthetic Experience.

I am intrigued by synesthesia. I don't have it, but I had something akin to it both times I was pregnant. During each pregnancy I had color-music cravings. The first pregnancy was bright purple and Paganini's violin concertos. The second pregnancy was bright orange and anything Chopin. Seeing/hearing those combinations was like a happy-happy-joy-joy buzz for me. Wish I still had that.

I think it's cool the connection you have with colors/numbers/letters. You should totally explore it.

Negative numbers, in my mind, bring up pictures of dark, wintery, deep, Scandinavian forests, while the numbers 1-10 are white to grey, 11-12 are somewhat in (photographically) bad lighting, and the lighting gets better as numbers go upward. Letters from the English alphabet are always in Alaska, letters from the Cyrillic alphabet are on a Japanese beach.

G (as in the musical note) is orange, an A Minor chord is scarlet, and all diminished chords are green. The word "cataclysm" is ALWAYS yellowish blue (not green), and several numbers have geometric and other shapes attatched to them (always 3D).

The point is, yes, I know what you're talking about. I think it may be something much more common among right-brained people, who don't do well with numbers. The right brain may be connecting left-brained topics with right-brained images, colours, and pictures in an effort to understand left-brained things. The left brain may have similar properties... but my left-brain is most definitely not my dominant cerebral hemisphere, so I don't have any internal experience with left-brain tendencies.

Anything in mathematics besides basic math and bits of geometry make no sense to me.

Thank you so much for the link!!!....

I just knew that it had to have a name!!!

I wish i could explore it more but there is actually not that much to explore. Most leters, numbers and colors just belong together and i have said this to several people before but they had no idea what i was talking about and i never give it that much attention.
I can come in handy when you want to know how many letters "A" there are on a certain page cause you just have to count all the red 4's..

But how cool would it be to have asociations with music!!! that sounds great and your pregnancy must have been great this way......

Again thanks for the link!!!...a star for you...

[edit on 11/2/2009 by operation mindcrime]

When I was a kid and learning to read I had a huge hangup over the fact that there are no capitol numbers, like there are letters. That helled the bugs out of me for years.

OTehr than that--music notes can be associated with color, and music has mathematical qualities, so perhaps you are not too far off.

reply to post by asmeone2


What there are no capital numbers??...

That cracked me up. You must have been a fun child!!!

Thanks for the laugh!!!

But i think the previous poster was on to something...

the feeling that *my* colors are right and other people's are wrong. It's not self-righteousness; it's much less elaborated than that. The sensation, almost of outrage, comes out of me like a little yelp when Carol tells me she likes my name because the 'k' is green. Green?! No way! It's *lavender*!

When i ask people what color belongs to 3 they give me all kinds of answers but i get that same feeling of outrage because it's green!!!

Peace

I posted a thread awhile back about my roommate's 10 year old son (11 now) who says everyone he knows has a number and color 'assigned' to them.

Synesthesia usually refers to perceiving colors and shapes in response to audio stimulus, but apparently there are other variations of it. Very interesting nonetheless.

I'm sorry to hear that you already made a thread about this...

I had no idea what to search for or if other people have the same experience so that's why i posted without looking. I will read you thread..

Thanks for the heads-up.....

When I hear songs, I see shapes. I always mix up green and orange.
And I have a nasty habit of having to read words backwards - food labels, street signs, business logos ... it is SO irritating!

I always found it interesting that energy in the form of sound could be arranged into 7s (octaves) and energy in the form of light could be arranged into 7s (visible spectrum) and wondered 2 things:

Is there energy in a third form which follows sevens? Perhaps we are overlooking such a pattern in heat.

And, if you go outside the visible spectrume, do colors arranged themselves into octaves also? Can you have a higher pitched blue or lower pitched green?

reply to post by operation mindcrime


Oh, no - it's not about the exact same thing, and there are other threads on ATS about synesthesia. Just related. I only mentioned mine because it, like yours is about what seems to be variations of similar phenomena. Not to derail yours, I just thought you might find mine interesting too.

I'm happy to see this kind of thing brought up again, hopefully we'll get some more insight along the lines of what asmeone2 (and others) have posted! I've recently been introduced to a school of thought that places more importance on visuals and physical 'light' than I had once understood. It's very new to me and I don't understand it enough to add much more, but I believe it's related. I'll see if I can't get the person who has been explaining it to me to look at this thread.

Haha, yeah I always did think a capital A should be red. People associate colors with everything. Red is the color of love or passion and also the color of anger or rage. Purple is associated with royalty. Yellow is usually associated with happiness or youth. Green and red are used for christmas and orange and black are used for halloween.

In music one might see a bass note as a dark redish color and a high pitched note as white or some other very light color depending on how its being played.

Originally posted by operation mindcrime
reply to post by asmeone2

 

What there are no capital numbers??...

That cracked me up. You must have been a fun child!!!

Thanks for the laugh!!!

But i think the previous poster was on to something...

I really thought my mom was holding out on me. I got quite mad. Yes I had some messed up ideas at that age.

Originally posted by blujay
When I hear songs, I see shapes. I always mix up green and orange.
And I have a nasty habit of having to read words backwards - food labels, street signs, business logos ... it is SO irritating!

Have you ever taken a test for color blindness? My brother can not see green and red I think, and he has it. There is an online test for it.

The reasons that things have connecting meaning stems from our own brains as humans. it one of the wonderful mysteries of the human mind. We make connections in our minds between things that have no discernable relationship to each other.

For example, have you ever smelled something and have been instantly reminded of a certain experience from your past? Your brain makes connections that last your entire life, based on your previous experiences. I think its basically comparable to how young kids are influenced by their childhoods, and then later in life that dictates their decisions. Does that make sense at all? Sorry its probably confusing

Yeah, i believe everyone has this kind of association. Especially with music!!!

I have a theme song for every period in my life starting from age 10. And a period could be a year or a couple of weeks but when i listen to on of them ,i'm right back there.

This is handy tip!!! Write down that one song that you just can't get out of your head because i a few years you will have forgotten about it!! Make a speciale little book to write them down in. I did this and i'm very happy i still have this list and every now and then i download a few from the list for in the carstereo......

Peace

We all have it to a certain extent, but synesthesiacs (is that a word?) have it on another level. For them it's not so much about "associating this with that" - it's something that happens in a way that's hard to understand for those of us who don't experience it.

Many of them don't realize that it's something unique to them until they try to use it as a point of reference in a conversation. For example, I remember reading an article about it somewhere in which a lady explained how she first realized she was 'different'. She said she was talking to a friend and they were trying to remember the name of someone they both knew. "His name has sort of a green tint to it." she said, to which her friend replied, "what are you talking about?"

Some of the posts here seem to miss the mark in trying to generalize this as something we all do. You might see a bass note as color x, I might see it differently. And as pointed out earlier, the color/sound associations differ from one synesthesiac to another.

When I listen to music I can definitely 'imagine' tones and shapes, but these people don't have to use their imaginations, they 'see' the colors and shapes, in motion. Sure it's 'in their heads' and not in front of them in 3-D so as to distract them from being able to function, but it is completely involuntary and takes no deliberate thought.

I had a girlfriend before who would point out designs in art that she said were like the images she saw when she heard certain music. She was mad for the song "Popcorn" from Hot Butter, the Moog-heavy proto-techno tune from 1972, because of the visuals it created for her.



[edit on 2/12/2009 by Teratoma]

I know what you mean. I never really thought much about it and thought everybody had this to a certain extend but only yesterday i found out it has a name (thanx again GirlNextDoor ).

But the best and only way to explain how i see things is this picture..



The right side is how i see numbers and some letters......

Weird ain't it...

Peace

Ps: those are 5's and 2's IMO 'cause in the left picture they are brown and yellow!!!!! And not as bright as in the left picture, it's way more subtle

[edit on 12/2/2009 by operation mindcrime]

reply to amatrine - button didn't work

I never have, now that would be interesting! If there is an online test, I'll find it, take it and let you know. Thanks!

[edit on 12-2-2009 by blujay]

reply to post by operation mindcrime


Interesting; so what happens when you see numerals printed with the 'wrong' color of ink? Do they have an 'aura' of the 'correct' color?