Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)

matthewjamestaylor.com

71 pointsiansteyn55 comments

I am not a synaesthete and I wonder how other non-synaesthetes perceived the '5 vs 2' diagram. Even though I see all the digits in plain black, the triangle of 2s immediately stood out to me. The author writes:

'For me, four-leaf clovers are a different shape so they stand out in a clover patch very much like this. Unlike letters and numbers, however, I don't get a sense of color, it's more like a sense of movement.'

But even as a non-synesthete, I felt a sense of movement in the 2s, as if they were little swans swimming against the bevy of 5s. But I felt no such movement when looking at the photographs of clovers. I could only spot a few four-leaf clovers at a quick glance because the pale markings on them form a rough quadrilateral, so I was essentially spotting those shapes rather than the four leaflets themselves.

If this sort of topic interests you, I wrote an article earlier this year about number–colour–phoneme associations: https://susam.net/assoc.html

As I mentioned, I do not have synaesthesia, yet the associations between numbers, colours and phonemes are quite strong in my mind due to early exposure to CGA colours and mnemonic systems. For instance, I find it hard to think of the number 1 without thinking of blue or the phonemes /t/ and /d/, or to think of 4 without thinking of red or /r/. I have written more about it in the article linked above.

Yes, I am also inclined to believe this is just natural human psyche phenomenon.

This very specific topic about clovers is one that I relate to, I've always found 4 leaf clovers faster. But I wouldnt say I have synesthesia.

This has developed/manifested itself into looking for things on a computer screen, which I essentially do for a living. I can hold a piece of text in my head and scroll by quickly to search for it much faster than many of my peers.

And as a child colors would also have numbers related to them in my mind, and vice versa. Which I attributed to number-coded coloring books.

Scrolling quickly and having typos jump at me (when I was editing text in the past) and required code fragments (now) is exactly how I experience it.

How strong is your visual imagination?

I'd say my visual imagination is pretty strong.

I bet we're just good at scanning. Eyes are made for looking and we can use a semi-subconscious level of looking that attracts our eyes to what we want to find.

Though I'm sure most everyone is, really.

I bet I just wanted to find 4 leaf clovers more than my peers and would focus more.

I used to read a ton as a kid, and now I can easily spot typos, extra spaces, etc when I glance at a page. If only I proofread my own writing *sigh*.

I don't have synesthesia as well. The 2s didn't stand out at all to me. I knew they were here and I could find them upon inspection but their locations were totally unknown to me at a glance. I would never have spotted that they form a triangle. Ask me anything

Do you have a pent up anger towards triangular things?

I'd like to be a part of one someday so probably no

I've been able to find four-leaf clovers easily since I was a kid. Like the OP they seem to just "pop out" at me as I quickly scan the ground, but I do not have the same background with synesthesia.

Since four and five leaf clovers tend to grow in patches, I transplanted a patch I found and have kept it in a planter on my deck so that anyone who has never found a four leaf clover can find one!

I wrote about my lucky clover patch here: https://jherrman.com/four-leaf-clover-patch.html

How strange. I introduced clover to my lawn a few years ago for its nitrogen fixing properties, and since then have spent many idle minutes (probably adding up to hours) searching for four-leaf clovers.

I have never found a single one, but easily picked out at least one in each of the pictures in the article in just a few seconds. Thinking this might be a breakthrough I went and snapped a few pictures of clover patches, but alas can't spot any. I suspect I'm getting subconscious hints from the author's framing of the photos.

I keep thinking to make a start on a phone app to do this, there’s probably a couple already.

Highlighting clove type things that don’t have 120°.

The distribution of four-leaf clovers is not uniform; they tend to cluster in certain areas. Many moons ago when I was a small kid, on my walk to school I had to walk a bit under high voltage power lines. Found tons of four-leaf clovers under there. I have no idea if the magnetic field did anything to help the mutation, or if it was just a coincidence, but I've never found a spot like that again.

I used to find a four leaf clover at least once a week during the summer when i was in the midwest. During the peak of summer, I could find 1-3 every time I took a walk.

Since moving to california, I did find some up around the mountains of the bay area (including a 7 leaf clover), but not many elsewhere in town.

In southern california I haven't found one yet.

> I'm getting subconscious hints from the author's framing of the photos.

This is what I attributed my finding them so quickly as well. Unless the author was taking pictures intently to not prominently frame them for use in such an article, the nature of photography will make this a likely result.

You might just not have any.

It really varies by area, probably a mix of genes and environment. Some areas I can't find any, some areas are rich with them.

A case of Solomon Shereshevsky [1] is very relevant here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky

He had synesthesia that made him unable to forget things for most of the life. His memory was so good he was able to recite ten and more (10+) years old dialogues word-for-word, some of those included remembering and reciting long arbitrary numbers. How so? Because almost everything he saw, heard or read was fascinating in its' own unique way.

(Shereshevsky had to learn how to forget things at later years of his life, successfully)

I do not have synesthesia, yet I've found that if I have any sort of strong feeling - direct, or through association, - about any subject, I remember everything about that subject better. Also, these strong feelings allow me to find analogues relatively easier, enriching my reasoning.

Richard Feynman described something like this in his autobiographies: when mathematicians told him to imagine two spheres, he imagined one as orange and the other one as hairy (or something like that). This way he was able to discover non-constructiveness of proofs, as non-constructive proofs have less use in physics.

So, in my experience, one can use (or learn to use) rich feelings about many things to make memory better and to find better solutions to problems faster.

> He had synesthesia that made him unable to forget things for most of the life.

Some counterpoints from the Wikipedia article as well:

> According to autobiographical diary of Shereshevsky, found by Reed Johnson, he "did not, in fact, have perfect recall". Details of Shereshevsky's biography are different in his own writing from Luria's account. [...] Reynberg recalls that Shereshevsky "could be forgetful", and that he "trained hours a day for his evening performances", because he needed "consciously try to commit something to memory".

I don't think synesthesia is necessarily a good explanation.

I am quite good at spotting 4-leaf clovers, but I don't have synesthesia. My eye just "catches" on them. I'm pretty sure it's actually the angle of the leaves that I'm spotting, because almost all of the false positives are situations where leaflets are at a 90° angle to each other.

(But I've found 5, 6, and 7 leaf as well.)

same for me, but I've never found a 7 leaf (which is extra annoying as a futurama fan)

>> I have several hundred [four leaf clovers]. I even have a few five-leaf clovers and a couple of sixers!

That doesn't fit the ratios in my experience.. I find about 1 five-leaf for every 5 four-leafers. They should have nearly 100 five leafers, not merely "a few".

EDIT: I checked and indeed the standard ratio is 4.8 four leaf clovers per five-leaf. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/73279/distributi...

I don't think they are uniformly distributed. Anecdotally, in my friend's backyard, the ratios I found were more like

    10000 three-leaf
    15 four-leaf
    7 five-leaf
    4 six-leaf
    2 seven-leaf

I would assume that the ratios in any given area can be quite different than another area.

This. The distribution varies greatly. Just like some patches have more 4 leaf clovers than other patches.

So 2:1 for four-leaf:five-leaf?

Seems to reinforce their point that this blog is bs

my point is that the ratios are variable, and thus 100:1 four-leaf:five-leaf is plausible

It's hard to see it being off by multiple orders of magnitude.

The link suggests that we expect to see 100:1 four-leaf to six-leaf ratio, but in that one patch I found about a 4:1 ratio. I think it is very plausible that different lineages and/or different environmental conditions could cause wildly varying numbers.

Oh man, my grandmother was like this with finding four leaf clovers. She would just find them constantly, all the time, on command, or maybe while standing around having a conversation. Her description of it was "it's like they're just jumping up and waving at me" which somewhat fits with the author's description of motion. Never heard of anyone else like this though, neat to see others in the comments.

People claiming that weird unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful) inner states give them magical powers has got to stop being respected.

Thinking 4 is red doesn't mean that you don't have to count anymore. It's as stupid of a claim as claiming that "hearing colors" allows people to see in the dark.

I'm a very, very fast minesweeper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game) ) player, and I play in a non-marking style (meaning I just click where mines aren't rather than bothering to mark where mines are.) I realized one day that I subjectively see the spots that I know don't have mines as differently colored than the ones that I know do. That does not mean that I am not doing the calculations in my head, it just means that they are so reflexive that I don't notice them. Because I am trying to clear as fast as I can, I've seen every pattern thousands of times, and my feedback is visual, there's a ghostly sort of visual marking showing the outcome of my calculation.

This is similar to how people echolocate and have no idea that they're echolocating: "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation" https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

We are not necessarily aware of what we are applying complex logic to, even when it requires delicate timing and swings wildly over tiny differences. I'd go even further and say that we are necessarily less aware of calculations that we are making quickly, because being quick does not allow time for reflection.

You've just gotten good at finding 4-leaf clovers because you spend an enormous amount of time looking for 4-leaf clovers.

Synesthesia is not well understood but it is a falsifiable phenomenon, and the medical consensus is very much that it exists.

Counterpoint: it is not a falsifiable phenomenon, and there is no medical consensus that it exists.

Source? Or is this satire

If you want to find academic sources arguing against the possibility of measuring and confirming synesthesia or denying its existence, you'll want to dig back to the 1970's. It's not a tenable position in the 21st Century.

> unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful) inner states

One of the great things about Synesthesia is that it is one of those places where we have in fact been able to study some really interesting things about perception by connecting it to external objective measures.

We've been able to do this most of all with psychophysics testing, but in recent years we have also been able to connect this with genetics data and neural data via fMRI.

Start with these:

Eagleman DM, Kagan AD, Nelson SN, Sagaram D, Sarma AK (2007). A standardized test battery for the study of Synesthesia. Journal of Neuroscience Methods. 159: 139-145

Ward, J., Simner, J., Simpson, I., Rae, C., Del Rio, M., Eccles, J. A., & Racey, C. (2024). Synesthesia is linked to large and extensive differences in brain structure and function as determined by whole-brain biomarkers derived from the HCP (Human Connectome Project) cortical parcellation approach. Cerebral Cortex, 34(11)

Tomson SN, Avidan N, Lee K, Sarma AK, Tushe R, Milewicz DM, Bray M, Leal SM, Eagleman DM (2011). The genetics of colored sequence synesthesia: Suggestive evidence of linkage to 16q and genetic heterogeneity for the condition. Behavioural Brain Research. 223(2011):48-52

Tomson SN, Narayan M, Allen GI, Eagleman DM (2013). Neural networks of colored sequence synesthesia. Journal of Neuroscience. 33(35):14098-106.

Interesting. Another thing I have that I didn't know about. I've found over 500 four leaf clovers as a kid. I still find them without looking as an adult when looking at something else on the ground or tying my shoe, etc. The movement thing isn't exactly like how I would describe it, but pretty close. It's almost like the eye auto focuses on it becuase it's different. Sometimes I would intentionally unfocus my eyes or concentrate on peripheral vision to make them jump out.

My mother used to find them all the time. I asked her how she did it and all she could say was that "I just notice them."

I can only find them if I'm on my hands and knees searching a clover patch. I can't say how many I've found but I'd certainly guess a single-digit number.

Same! Used to stop my bike hard on my way home to pick up one I just noticed in the peripheral of my vision at the edge of the road. No idea how, they just jumped out to me. Then put them between random pages in my moms old encyclopedias to press and preserve them. Got hundreds.

I, too, experience some synethesia with letters and numbers (two is green, three is yellow, 4 is blue), but when I look at a field of clover, I don't experience a field of numbers representing the number of leaves on the individual clover stalks. In fact that seems like a weird way of perceiving nature. When I see a bird flying with its two wings outstretched, I'm not experiencing the number 2, and thus I get no sense of green.

Respectfully, I don't think synesthesia is behind OP's purported skill.

Hi, synesthesia researcher here! (1)

Here's a few relevant things we know:

- Synesthesia is not rare. You probably know someone that has synesthesia, even they haven't mentioned it.

- There are many forms of synesthesia. Many documented forms that we know of, and very probably a bunch we haven't documented yet.

- There are cases of tasks where we are able to measure enhanced performance of that task by synesthetes. (2)

- While some synesthetes do have a single form of synesthesia, it is common for synesthetes to experience multiple forms. We've found cluster groups where subjects with a given form are more likely to have another form within the same cluster.

From the other writings on the OP's site, we can see that they report to have at least two forms of Colored Sequence Synesthesia: Grapheme -> Color, and Day of the Week -> Color.

Their report of their experience in the linked article sounds like possibly Shape -> Motion. This is a form they could have, and it's plausible that someone already known to be a multiple synesthete might also experience this.

It is also plausible that someone with a Shape -> X type of synesthesia would be able use that to spot the odd shape out faster than others.

------

(1) I maintained the online synesthesia battery for a number of years while working in the Eagleman Neuroscience Lab at Baylor College of Medicine

(2) Some of these are ones that allowed us to study synesthesia on a larger scale by testing online! Among those, one particularly notable form of test is Stroop Interference. Genuine synesthetes are able to respond much faster and more accurately, and we get a good clear separation between them and controls.

That all sounds very interesting. As someone who has synesthesia, I’d be interested if you still maintain those tests you refer to?

I'm not currently active with it myself, but the site is still here:

https://synesthete.org

Back when I was handling it, we were still using Flash for most of the interactive tests, because that was how you had to do it when it was first built circa 2007. Obviously those would have had to be redone in HTML5 since then to keep it working on modern browsers.

The main protagonist in my novel experiences synethesia. She talks about numbers having colours. To help ensure consistency throughout the novel, I developed a text editor (KeenWrite) that allows me to refer to externally defined variables within the prose, such as:

      syn_1: black
      syn_2: purple
      syn_3: red
      syn_4: gold
      syn_5: blue
      syn_6: silver
      syn_7: yellow
      syn_8: brown
      syn_11: teal
      syn_16: orange

It's tempting to change the colour map based on your abilities. How far does your colour mapping go and what other "columbers" (that's what the protagonist calls them) do you perceive?

>It's a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.

So what happens when synesthetes watch a movie that is showing blue colors, but the score that they are hearing at that time is making them see red. Do they perceive that as a dissonance?

Have you seen the concept of "impossibly colors"? Maybe like those, where you present one color to one eye and one to the other, and make the brain invent something.

Fascinating.

This makes me wonder if there’s a way to set data visualisation to make the most of this for those gifted people.

I’m in a minority thinking that perhaps the limiting RGB colour gamut should be made into 4 colours to accommodate those people who can see four colours, tetrachromacy, ~95% of us have a visual impairment.

I wonder if humans killing 4+ leaf clovers is enough of issue that they're selected against...

The plant survives, even if the leaves get damaged. So it's not really selecting against them.

I'd imagine the practice of mowing introduces a lot of noise into that signal.

It helps that the four leaf phenotype can be recessively carried and passed on by normal clovers.

I don’t see color change but I “hear” them when I scan my eyes over the pictures, and when I listen more closely I can spot more subtle details (including the 5-leaf clovers).

Clover can’t be the same species both sides of the Atlantic can it?

Is American clover an invader, or a similar species from before tectonic plates drew out the Ocean?

Meta-HN question from a newbie: Can someone help me understand why my 9-day-old submission is suddenly on the front page and says it’s from 3 hours ago?

Edit: Solved.

Could be something from the second-chance pool.

See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Aha, yep this is it. I got an email about it but didn’t notice until just now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com