A while ago I asked on Twitter if anyone else saw things as I did - for example numbers on a squiggly line moving upwards in a kind of stepping stone pattern. Also, I explained how I imagine days of the week as Sunday being in a dip lower than Monday and Wednesday being on a hill and slightly green. I got a couple of people saying that they saw things similar to me, a few people telling me it sounded like synaesthesia, but the majority of people going "Eh?! You're mad!" as they hastily rang up the men in white coats to cart me away for finally giving in to insanity. Well...not quite. After a quick Google I stumbled across a few things on the internet by people experiencing similar things to me (here, here and here) which somewhat confirmed that I probably do have synaesthesia.
Synaesthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory of cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. In other words, triggering one sense automatically triggers another sense which would not normally have an associated reaction. This can lead to people seeing numbers and letters as having their own colours; one word or sound triggering a taste response; or imagining or "seeing" periods of time or numbers as spatial 3D map. Someone told me of a programme they saw where every time a man touched a £5 note he tasted bacon and many people can distinctly say that the number five is yellow, Z is white etc. It's a strange and fascinating thing but something I'm very interested in because I'm pretty sure I have spatial-sequence and number form synaesthesia. Not as fun as tasting bacon every time I touch a fiver but still pretty handy and something I can't imagine not having.
How the year might look to someone with synaesthesia
"If you are a synaesthate with a red A, your A has always been red and will always be red. And it's so intrinsic, that many synaesthetes never question whether this is unusual". It's important to note that although often similar, the forms/colours people associate with different months/numbers etc are exclusive to each person, therefore the information available about each type varies widely.
How numbers may look to someone with grapheme-colour synaesthesia (by Angela Hill)
I have thought this way for as long as I can remember, but it was very prominent when I was in primary school, especially learning numbers and times tables. I get this effect of "mind-mapping" with every kind of sequence possible. Days of the week, times of the day (a bit less unusual as I simply visualise the clock-face), months of the year, years throughout history...and I still use it constantly today.
It's quite difficult to draw on paper how I visualise things as instead of a set 2D form it's more of a dynamic 3D map, kind of like a computer simulation, which I "fly over" in my mind. For example smaller numbers (1-10) are in a kind of valley and higher numbers - into the thousands - are at the top of a mountain. If I'm thinking of a number such as 15 I'll place in my mind being at the bottom of a mountain, looking up towards the higher numbers which are sitting on the outline of the mountain slope. Not a literal mountain, but the shape and the contours are similar.
I rarely see the full set of months at a time, only the months which are important to me at moment I'm having to think about them. For example if it's January and I'm thinking towards the coming September, I'll only see the names of January and September and September will be significantly further away and lower down than January. Therefore once I put all the months together on a drawing like below, it doesn't look much like how I'd actually imagine it, but I don't think there's a way I could accurately depict how it looks. It's like asking someone to explain a dream vividly from start to end or to draw it - some bits are blurrier than others and other parts are missing, with some parts just not making any sense in reality. Although I know how I imagine some months very vividly, other months like August are a bit wishy-washy. I'd describe it as a kind of mental calendar or diary where I can see each week in a month laid out, including the things I have planned on each day. I rarely use actual calendars/diaries as my mental calendar is so accurate I don't need to - the money I don't spend on diaries I can spend on vodka - hooray!
In terms of visualising numbers, I've always imagined them as if they are on a kind of hill. For example if I'm doing maths and I'm adding or subtracting I visualise myself hopping up or down a hill, however many units I need to add/subtract by. I'll visualise myself at the bottom of the "hill" at 0 and look up to see 20, 30, 40 etc, the bigger the number the further up it seems. 100 is always at the top of the hill, and then after that the "hill" repeats so that 100-200 is just another hill, on top of the first original hill. (Does this make any sense? I think I'm lost too...) Higher numbers continue infinitely upwards to the right, and lower numbers infinitely downwards to the left.
I really struggled to draw how I visualise the week, because although many existing diagrams have expressed the week in a sort of circular repeating form (same as the months), my days continue on a timeline considering both the days of the past week (e.g. last Monday) and those in the near future (next Wednesday, a week on Thursday, etc). I've never really seen colours with the days apart from Wednesday which has always been a grass-green hill. Not sure why! I've also always seen Pancake Tuesday as being a pale sky blue but that's about the only specific day of the year which I see in colour.
As I said, I don't visualise what I've actually drawn below as it is, in the same way that you'd think of a banana and see a banana. It's not a 2D drawing in my mind, it's more a constantly changing dynamic - the steepness of the slope with the days on is determined by what day of the week it is. Also, whether I imagine myself looking at the days straight on and "flat", or if I'm doing the whole "on top of a mountain looking down" thing is determined by whether I'm thinking about the days in context of the past, present or future. The not-so-long-ago past would appear steeper than an event a few months ago which would be on a smoother line and seem a lot further away. Sunday has always been in a trough next to Monday and Monday and Tuesday along with Thursday and Friday have always been quite flat, with Wednesday as a "hump" in the middle. The weekdays are visibly separate from the weekends although Friday, Saturday and Sunday come together as a separate group, even though I also visualise Friday as a component in the weekdays, therefore there is some overlap in it.
The sequence which is the most definite for me is years. For whatever reason I've always been able to strongly imagine how different decades "look" e.g. the 1970s is on a smoother curve whereas the 1990s is quite irregular - possibly because I was born in 1992 and so associate that decade with rapid change. 2000 has always marked a significant change in the line - to approach the new century - and therefore anything after 2000 slopes considerably down to the left as it's categorised as "last century". The decade from 2000-2010 is fairly straight but 2011 is in a dip (this is always related to whatever year it is at the time) and then the years of the future rapidly increase to the right in quite a regular formation (probably because they haven't happened yet, therefore nothing distinctive has happened to influence their shape). Again, before the 1900s there is another vertical drop to the 1800s which gradually levels out into a straight line as we approach the 1700s, then the 1600s etc, moving further back in time.
One thing I also thought was quite significant when I did a bit of reading up about this was the claims that many synaesthates have photographic memories. I always thought this might be the case for me, an example being before an exam I could glimpse at a page for about ten seconds and then re-visualise the page in my mind during the exam, being able to read the words I had simply *seen* and not actually read before. I'm very good at remembering dates - birthdays in particular - and can recall insignificant memories in amazing detail such as remembering what the buttons looked like on the dress I wore for my 5th birthday party without having seen any photos of it since the day I wore it. I'm also really good at remembering things people have said to me which often surprises and freaks people out how I remember them once telling me about something completely trivial which they hadn't even remembered saying themselves.
All in all it's a very unusual but useful thing to have, and to people who don't have synaesthesia it probably does sound a bit "crazy" but I can't imagine how I'd cope without it. A few things I read presented it negatively as a "condition" and similar to autism which it's not, it's not an illness just a different way of programming information. I've always known I was a very visual person but now I think about it, I'm not sure if that was just the synaesthesia. Does every other visual learner have this? I certainly think it helps me to remember and understand things. I guess I was just interested if anyone else has synaesthesia and what kind of types you have? If anyone sees the spatial/number forms like me or gets the colour/taste associations? I think there's a lot of mystery about it because so many people probably have it and don't realise, so I'd be interested to see if anyone I know experiences similar things!
