Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 141
- 3
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I have synesthesia, specifically grapheme-color synesthesia. I didn't know this until I was a second year in med school. My behavioral science (think psychiatry) professor was teaching us normal, non-pathological variants of human behavior because it's important to know what is "weird but normal". Like he related a story from a colleague of his who had seen a 14 year old girl for "hearing voices", and after questioning it turned out to be her internal monologue, that sort of thing. When he described synesthesia I said, loud enough for him to hear, "what the fuck?" which stopped the class. He asked me if there was a problem and I said well no but I guess I have synesthesia and hadn't realized. He asked me to talk to him after class so he could pick my brain a bit but unfortunately I'm not very interesting because I don't hear colors or taste people. I've had this condition for a while. My phone number has a lot of 3s in it because when I was 16 and had to choose a phone number at the Cingular store the phone guy gave me three possible numbers and I chose the one with the 3s because 3s are green and that's my favorite color. Had no idea what I was doing at the time.
Interestingly this isn't the first time I've come into contact with the subject. A friend of my wife's from college tasted people. For instance when she thought about or interacted with my wife she vaguely tasted spaghetti and meat sauce. I was a strawberry Flintstones push-pop. Another friend of ours was Domino's pepperoni pizza. Come to think of it all of the foods were childhood foods; nobody was flank steak dressed with ancho-peanut coulis.
There aren't a ton of practical benefits for this condition, but they do exist:
"2x4=8"
"5x2=10"
"2x9=18"
...and so on in every combination up through 12 plus the reverse so a list was 24 entries long. This list she gave us was also the test, but with the answers filled in. So the test was like...
"2x4=_"
"5x2=_"
"2x9=_"
...and so on. She told us to "memorize it", and thought we would memorize it across. Little me didn't know that so I memorized the 32 digits vertically, and easily. I didn't figure out I was doing it wrong until she asked me to go to the blackboard to answer a multiplication question I should have known, like "3x8=_", but I couldn't do it which confused her because I had thus far gotten 100% on all the tests. Idk if I'm explaining it well but you know how little kids don't find adult logic obvious at first. "Why am I memorizing a list of 26 numbers?" No idea dude I just do what I'm told.
I sometimes realize I've spelled a word wrong because the color looks wrong. I chronically spell "separate" as "seperate" but the latter doesn't look red enough because "a"s are red and "e"s are purple.
I can use colored pencils to record a string of numbers on paper, like part of a password, by drawing little boxes in various colors. It's like a personal encryption device. This is probably the most useful though it's quite limited, especially since 2 and 9 are awfully close in color.
This is largely limited to Latin script and Arabic numerals. Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese look like nothing to me. Greek is a bit red, white and blue/black, Korean is a little blue, and Cryilic is a bit yellow and blue, but mostly, I don't see much with unfamiliar characters. As an experiment, I decided to start "learning" Russian on duolingo to see if maybe knowing the language would force the issue. 5 months later I'm here to report the results:
Resounding success. ж which makes a "zh" sound looks purplish/brown to me, and "z" looks purple and "h" looks brown so makes sense. б is sounds like and is brown like a "b". л is yellow and sounds like an "l". д is brown like "d" which it also sounds like. "C", which sounds like "s" in Russian, has gotten more yellow, just like how I see "s" in English. So I think for the most part the sound the phenomes make is the primary influence, at least when learning a new language.
Are there any words that are particularly pretty/ugly/interesting due to the colours, or the pattern of the colours? Like maybe there's one that makes a rainbow, or an alternating -_-_-_- pattern or something like that.
Xylophone is ugly, so is elephant. Christmas is nice, but I am not in on any patterns
I might not have phrased that very well. When I say patterns I mean like blue-green-blue-green-blue, or maybe words that have palindromic colours but not letters. Not literal graphic patterns.
Can you describe what is good/bad about xylophone, elephant and Christmas?
https://i.imgur.com/JQgRffz.png
I spelled out the three words, respectively, and a couple others which don't qualify as answers to your question but is as close as I got while thinking about it. Words look more like the spray paint effect ones than the explicitly colored ones. I simply don't like/like the arrangement of colors for the first three. You may see that I made "n" red in the spray paint ones but orange in 'Banana' and 'Coconut'; it's slightly 'orangier' than the red indicated in the first two but I got a bit lazy about it. I like "Coconut" as a word and I think that's mainly because C is green and actually the only letter that is green, whereas b d f g h t and to a certain extent e and r are shades of brown, I am starting to feel like if I keep talking about what graphemes are what colors I'll come off as narcissistic lol
I can't reach Imgur. Any chance you can rehost it here?
Lemme give this a shot
/images/17942517685076623227287b6f4.webp
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link