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Comment by keeganjw | Hacker News Reader

I remember I was 18, at college, and was eating in the dining hall with my friends one evening. We somehow started talking about our favorite colors and I said my favorite color was yellow probably because my name looks so yellow. They stopped eating and stared at me like I was crazy. They asked how does your name look yellow? I was like, what do you mean, it just is yellow. Do words not have colors for you? And just saying that out loud I realized how bizarre that sounded and that I didn't have an explanation for it. I honestly had never thought that much about the fact that words had colors for me. They proceeded to ask me what colors a ton of words were and then tested me again a few days later to see if I said the same things because they didn't believe me.

And that's how I found out I had synaesthesia.

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There is a game in which players are shown a series of words that name colors, i.e. "yellow", "red", "green", etc. Sometimes the words are the same color as what they state - "yellow" being drawn in yellow, for instance. Other times, the words are written in a different color, for instance "blue" being written in green. Then, participants are asked quickly to state either the color of a given word, or to read the word, in a sequence of words according to different patterns. Studies on this seem to indicate that everyone has at least some capacity to confuse words with the sensations they evoke, and if anyone has not done one of these exercises it can be very interesting.

EDIT: Also, the descriptions people report of their imagination when reading a narrative description or exposition of a scene often include details seemingly arising in a loose associative way from the words themselves, without being explicitly described in the text.

EDIT 2: And I'm not entirely comfortable with the notion that people experience the world in a "fundamentally different way" when there is evidence that this may not be a fundamental difference after all. Different it is, no doubt, but this seems to be a difference of magnitude rather than fundamental nature. The predominant character of the experiences may be subjectively different, leading to a different approach to many situations in a person's life, but the mechanisms appear to be fundamental to consciousness itself.

This is the so called Stroop effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

For synaesthesia-challenged Emacs users: https://i.imgur.com/ZQkgI3U.png

That looks so incredibly wrong.

Do you actually physically see yellow with your eyes or is it more in your mind, or a feeling of yellowness? Also do different people with synaesthaesia see the same colors for the same words?

I can answer the second question, which is 'no'.

With my grapheme→colour and word→colour synaesthesia, it’s definitely in my mind—when I look at the letter A, for example, my brain has the same reaction as if I were looking at a yellow object, even though I can see that it’s not actually yellow.

An upside of synaesthesia is that I have very good clerical accuracy, which is helpful for programming—typographical errors “stick out” because things appear the wrong colour. A downside is that I can’t really use syntax highlighting, because I find it distracting. This is what my terminal Emacs looks like: https://imgur.com/m76W8eF (with soft wrapping because there’s not really a line length limit in this codebase).

hmm, I'm not sure but I think there are many people with hidden synaesthesia like you, especially other forms that we don't know yet. Or there are different types of synaesthesia-like neurological phenomenons. Unsure if the government/doctors or schools should help you use/detect these or not.

I didn't think about this, but does feeling a smell or scent in different emotional strengths also count to synaesthesia?

Does this affect how you perceive designs with colored text in them?

Yes, a little bit. If you gave me a word in a certain color font, that would take precedence. Its not like I was see "my" color. But if I thought of the word out of that context, it would be its normal color again (usually based on the color of the first letter like described in the article). Exceptions are things like logos which have a fairly strong association with certain colors.

It doesn't seem to. Text can be in any color and my synaesthesia stays the same. If the text itself was multicolored, maybe? I'm not sure. It doesn't come up that often.

How do you perceive the Google's logo?

I'm not the op, but I have the same grapheme–colour synaesthesia, and I perceive Google's logo in its original colors. But if I look at the word Google in plain text (or imagine it in my mind's eye) the coloration is different. [G] is kind of a brown, the [o]s are black, the [l] is white, and only the [e] at the end has any color, a bright green. I have to think about the individual letter associations; the brown and black dominate my perception of the word itself, but the vowels are a bit brighter. It's... kind of hard to describe, I'll admit.

I guess I should stress that I don't "see" these colors. I just know, intuitively, that they are there. They are the color of the letters in my mind's eye, if you will. I suspect thus that it has nothing to do with the shape of the letters, but is a side effect of how my brain processes the language, and understands the underlying phonemes. That would also explain why the vowels seem to be so much brighter, since they are the most important letters when I'm scanning text quickly for comprehension.

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