Mutant Superpowers

This approximates what some music looks like to me. Specifically, this exact frame came from a song by Sigur Rós called Viðrar vel til Loftárása. At seven minutes and fifty five seconds into the song (when the violin solos kick in over the guitars), this is what the sound looks like to me. Now imagine it moving.

Synaesthesia and Eideticism

Synesthesia is a genetic condition of unknown cause in which a stimulus of one sense causes an involuntary added perception in one or more other senses, a 'neuro-sensory cross-wiring'. My variant of synesthesia causes the interplay of colors, shapes and sounds—that is, I see sound, hear light, and read and do math in colors. For example, when I look at the letter 'A', I see it as the color it's written in, but perceive it as being written in red. When hearing music, I 'see' the sounds play out in front of me, overlaid on my visual perception of reality. Likewise, when I see light (especially bright light), I hear tones: bright pure white light sounds like squealing brakes (so I wear sunglasses in order to carry on conversations in bright sunlight). The secondary perceptions never change for any primary perception, which is why I can tune my guitar by just 'looking' at the colors each string makes.

This is what my old laptop looked like. I removed each of the keys individually and taped colored pieces of paper over the keys corresponding to my synesthetic perceptions. It actually allowed me to type faster and more accurately. I've done this to a few laptop keyboards since then, but it becomes troublesome when trying to type in other languages.

This causes all sorts of bizarre cognitive dissonances, though:

• Stroop tests give me a massive headache. The word "red" is brown, the words "blue" and "brown" are both yellow, and the word "purple" is grey, among others.
• When driving around cities with dark green names like "Dallas", I seldom see the printing on the signs without concentrating pretty hard.
• I can seldom keep similarly colored words separate in my mind. For example, two major roads through Arlington, Texas are "Cooper" and "Collins," which are very similar shades of light blue. To keep them separate, I have to convince myself that "Cooper" is actually spelled "Cupr."
• If a person is talking to me with a bright light shining behind them, I have to read lips in order to hear them.
• My last name (Stayskal) is a relatively common color (dark blue leading to reddish brown), but my first name (Dann) is a color that doesn't exist in nature—it's both red and green at the same place and perception-time.

The upside, though, is that it generally doesn't take me very long (three to six months, depending on complexity) for me to learn a foreign language. This has a lot to do with how my synesthesia interplays with my eideticism—a type of photographic memory.

Photographic memory

Eideticism is one of the related traits of my type of synesthesia. It's more commonly called photographic memory, though the terms aren't strictly synonymous. Pretty much anything I see I remember, within certain limits. For example, I could tell you where on the page anything was that I've ever read, but If you asked me the exact wording, I probably couldn't tell you. If you asked me about any class I've ever been in, kindergarden through grad school, I can tell you where people sat, what they wore, exactly what posters were on the wall, the type of tile on the floor, the colors of the walls, how the instructor wrote on the board, and so on.