Seeing sounds

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JennieRichee wrote:

This is interesting.As a child I associated numbers with colours, too...but only the numbers 1 - 12!
12 was my favourite, a vibrant purple. 10 was a deep rose colour, 8 was (I think) green. I have forgotten the other colours; but I remember feeling that the numbers from 13 onwards were rather dull, because they had no colours.
But why should any number have colour? Synaesthesia involving the physical senses seems reasonable ... maybe there is an overlap in neurological function between the different areas of the brain that deal with senses such as sight, hearing, touch etc. But surely the concept of "number" is not a physical sense. Its more of an abstract idea; so why should it be associated with such defined visual sensations? And why only certain numbers?
Incidently, I have read that synaesthesia is commoner among young children than in adults. The ability to fuse the senses in this way seems to become lost as the person gets older; maybe this is something to do with the way in which the nervous system itself matures.

Last edited by Glenn on 04 Jan 2005, 6:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

or is learned out of them, cos it's not useful behaviour, much like learning social skills and not believing in fairies *cough*. i'm sure that this happens - think of all the things you could do as a child cos no-one told you that you couldn't... i hope i haven't lost all of that facility.

sometimes, ignorance IS bliss...

Last edited by vetivert on 07 Dec 2005, 4:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yes; and smiling at trees, and talking to imaginary friends, and saying "look someone's here" when a bird flies into the garden, and staring at stuffed animals' faces real long... So many people seem to think that growing up means losing old things instead of adding new things to the old... It makes me sad to see all those artificially grown-up people who can't just "be" anymore...

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I've always thought of left as yellow and right as green, to this day that's how I remember which is which. Does that count as synaesthesia?