Synesthesia
For some people the letter A is always red. It's real, it's consistent, and sometimes it's learned from toys.
- Any form
- ~4% of people (Simner et al. 2006)
- Colored letters or digits
- ~1% (Simner et al. 2006)
Synesthesia is a crossing of the senses: a sound, letter or number automatically brings a color, every time; poets like Rimbaud only played at it. The most common kind is grapheme-color synesthesia, where letters and digits have their own colors. In a 2006 survey that tested people instead of waiting for volunteers, Julia Simner's team found about 4% of people had some form of synesthesia, and about 1% had colored letters or numbers.
It isn't make-believe. Ask a synesthete the color of K and you'll get the same shade months or years later, which ordinary people can't fake. But the colors can be learned. In 2013 Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer described 11 American synesthetes whose letter colors matched a popular Fisher-Price set of fridge magnets (A red, B orange, C yellow), and 10 of them remembered owning it.
Artists have chased the idea for a long time. Wassily Kandinsky wrote that hearing Wagner's Lohengrin in Moscow, “I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes.” Whether he had synesthesia in the clinical sense is debated, but he built a whole theory of color as sound in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Arthur Rimbaud's sonnet Voyelles gives each vowel a color, but it reads like a poet's invention, not a report.
Synesthesia shows how tightly a brain can bind a color to a symbol. Francis Galton described people with colored numbers in 1880, and the novelist Vladimir Nabokov described his colored alphabet in his memoir. Learning color words builds a weaker version of the same bond in everyone: a name that calls up a color.
Swatches
- A · red (magnet set)
- B · orange (magnet set)
- C · yellow (magnet set)
- D · green (magnet set)
Colors
Sources
- Simner, J. et al. (2006). Synaesthesia: the prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences. Perception 35(8): 1024–1033.
- Witthoft, N. & Winawer, J. (2013). Learning, memory, and synesthesia. Psychological Science 24(3): 258–265.
- Kandinsky, W. (1913). Rückblicke (Reminiscences). Berlin: Der Sturm.
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