Synesthesia and Eideticism

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 dancing.

Sensory crosswiring

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 perception of "reality". Likewise, when I see light (especially bright light), I hear tones: bright pure white light sounds like squealing brakes in the distance. The secondary perceptions never change for any primary perception 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, because I didn't have to think "Ok, I want the letter Red. That looks like 'A' in English. Yep, that's the key I need to press to get red on the screen."

This causes all sorts of bizarre cognitive dissonances, though:

• I can't even think of taking a Stroop test. The word "red" is brown, the words "blue" and "brown" are both yellow, and the word "purple" is grey, among others.
• When driving around towards Dallas, I seldom see the printing on the signs without looking for it: the word "Dallas" is almost the same color as the sign upon which it's typically printed.
• 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 almost identical 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 red), 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 (two to five 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.

The way synesthesia and eideticism work together is rather fascinating. When I read anything, the letters and words are immediately processed into colors (or, in my perception, the colors are immediately processed into words). Since I 'see' the colors just as vividly as regular vision, I photographically remember the color sequences. My name, to me, isn't "dann", it's "DarkGreen/Red-LightBrown". This is why it's so easy for me to discern written languages: every language, due to character frequency, has different 'dominant colors'. Learning languages is also simplified - once I know the syntax, grammar and phonology, the vocabulary is all just color memory.

The charts that follow are my rough approximations of the colors I perceive when I look at certain letters:

A         Red B   Dark Yellow C   Light Blue D   Dark Green E   Light Green F   Medium brown G   Dark Brown H   Lighter Brown I   Off-White J   Light Light Blueish K   Burnt Orangeish Brown L   Yellow

M   Medium Brown N         Light Brown O         Clear P   Purpleish Gray Q   Silvery Light Light Purple-Blue R   Brownish-Orange S   Dark Navy Blue T   Black U   Purpleish Gray V   Grayish-purple W   Yellow-brown X   Dark Gray

Y   Reddish-brown Z   Medium Gray 0         Clear 1   White 2   Yellow 3   Medium Green 4   Red 5   Brown 6   Blue 7   Orange 8   Dark Green 9   Such a dark blue it's almost black

Frequently Asked Questions:

How did you get synesthesia?
Synesthesia is a genetic condition. It affects about 1 in every 25,000 people; about five out of six are women. It's genetically transmitted through the X chromosome. Those of us with synesthesia tend to be either left-handed or ambidextrous, tend towards some form of autism, and have eidetic memories with higher frequencies than normal.

What written material is colored?
Every grapheme that I know how to pronounce has a color: Roman, Greek, Numbers, Logic symbols, Cyrillic, etc. I haven't learned a pictographic writing system (such as Hanzi, Kanji, or Hanza) yet, though, so don't know how color will interplay with the radicals yet once I do learn one.

How to words get colored by letters?
These colors are on a letter-by-letter basis. When words are taken as a whole, the whole word is one color, taken mostly from of the color of the first letter, a little of the second, and very small bit of the third. If, however, the word begins with an 'O', then the word takes the color of the second letter. For example, "stayskal" as letters looks like , whereas taken as a word looks like . Words can take on colors beyond this pattern if stressed syllables later in the word dominate its pronunciation.

What color is your voice?
Probably red, or something close to it. Men with very low voices tend towards orange and women tend towards reddish-purple. I've known two people with voices of almost pure red: both are men named David.

Any other questions?
Feel free to send me any other questions. I'll post answers to the good ones here.