What it’s Like to “Feel” Numbers — Inside the Brain of a Synesthete
I stare at the clock on my desk. 8:05PM. A mixture of hot and cold feelings pours over me. 8 gives me joy. A bubbly, warm feeling, a maternal care, almost, that is infused with 5, an uptight, military, hostile feeling. I’m currently working on my neuroscience research, and yet I have trouble concentrating on the paper at hand. The clock continues to tick. 8:06PM rolls around, and I’m a lot more at ease. 6 once again is feminine. It’s the image of a slightly chubby mid-aged lady, an aunt of some sort, that gives you cookies and listens to your problems about boys. The clock continues to tick. I have to meet some friends at 9, and I tried to concentrate on finishing up my research paper before meeting up with them.
At 8:45 PM, a number that has red and white stripes that remind me of a jet in the air, I stood up and left my room. As I got in the elevator of my dorm to go downstairs to meet my friends, I can hear the faint beeping sound as the elevator passes by each floor. Seven, six, five, four, three. The elevator doors open, and in comes a guy with a baseball hat and a skateboard. Awfully late for skateboarding, I thought to myself. The elevator doors close and the descend continues. Each floor has its own personality, each floor has its own gender and stories.
I’ve felt numbers my whole life. It’s something that I lived with and thought was perfectly normal until the topic of synesthesia came up in a discussion about neuroscience a few years ago. Seeing how I am ambidextrous, someone asked if I was synesthetic as well. He was doing research on correlations between mix-handed individuals and synesthesia. I didn’t know what it was and after much digging around, I realized that I indeed have synesthesia, multiple forms of it, in fact.
In my younger years, the world was a fascinating place to me. The smell, the sound, the sight, everything in life was so new and exciting. Unbeknownst to my parents, what they attributed to an active imagination turned out to be a physical anomaly. Parts of my brain overlapped in early childhood and the trigger of one would cause another. This is synesthesia. Unlike my peers, I loved math, though I didn’t dare to ever say that out loud in school for the fear of being bullied. Numbers represented a world where the good and evil interacted freely, and the outcomes are often different from those in the real world. Each number was different, each number had its own personality, gender, and story. Even numbers were feminine, and odd numbers were masculine. During my “boys have cooties” stage of childhood, I vehemently hated odd numbers. Those brain patterns reached well into adulthood, when I no longer believe that “boys have cooties” but still resent most odd numbers for some odd reason. What was more fascinating was that when numbers interacted, you can turn good into evil, and evil into good. When 4 and 5 interacted, they formed either 9 or 20 in my small, child-like mind at the time. 4 was my absolute favorite number in the world. It was the definition of perfection. Nothing in the world was quite as beautiful. 5 on the other hand, was this uptight, military figure. He is short and skinny and short-tempered. Intimidating and well-hated by everyone. Yet, when 4 and 5 meet, 4 can either turn 5 into the image of a slightly tamed woman, 20, who is still arrogant and yet classy and beautiful, or 5 can turn 4 into 9, another short-tempered man that looks kind of like Mario. Researchers have very little to say about ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia, the technical term to describe this odd behavior. It is largely understudied. Letters have personalities for me too, Chinese characters, especially. Perhaps some of my speed reading tendencies have to do with reading based on feelings of letters/characters rather than actual meaning. It’s messy and strange, but somehow helps me to learn, perhaps even a little more effectively.
Numbers also appear on a 3D map around me. Researchers call this number-form synesthesia. When I commit a number or a series of numbers to memory, they are stored on the 3D map. There are hills and valleys, twists and turns on this map. It’s like riding down a windy road on a motorcycle on a hot summer day. The trees and shrubs along the way become numbers, numbers that in turn become meaningful. I almost never forget a birthday, or what my agenda looks like for next Wednesday (what researchers call sequence-space synesthesia (SSS), though I would group it together with number-form synesthesia), because everything is so visual and locational. When I perform mental calculations, these 3D maps come alive. The bends and folds allow numbers to jump and transform when you apply different operations to them. Their personalities in turn change. So do genders.
Synesthesia isn’t a bad thing. I was able to fast track my math to college level by the end of elementary school. I once tried to memorize digits of pi in middle school out of boredom and got to 200 digits within 10 minutes before I grew bored of that. I can still easily recite these 200 digits to this day.
Over the years, my synesthesia has definitely changed. Number maps evolved. When I’m learning a new language, numbers greater than 100 turn towards the left, where there are more shadows and uncertainty. When I’m doing familiar calculations, numbers greater than 100 turn towards the right, and a familiar and more relaxing scenery unfolds. When I’m looking at housing prices and mortgages, the numbers hang off a cliff steeply at a 90-degree angle. Numbers greater than $200,000 steadily make an ascend into the abyss of despair. Numbers have feelings. The day I turned 25, I felt a huge bump on the road in my 3D map. That lump remained there, tripping me every time I come across the number 25. By the time I approached 30, I saw a sharp turn towards the right, and with it, came feelings of despair. Some people call it a quarter-life crisis. That quarter-life crisis is a lot more visual and acute to me given my synesthesia.
Personalities for numbers also changed. Admittingly, this is the one type of synesthesia I have that has slowly faded over time. I recall as a toddler, I had strong feelings of love towards the number 4. I would loudly declare it every time someone asked what my favorite number was. Imagine the look of utter shock and confusion on Asian adults’ faces as they hear the number. My ethnic culture is seemingly filled with superstition. 4 homophonically sounded like the word for death in Chinese, and many considered it to be bad luck. By the time I was seven, an Asian adult finally challenged me in my reasoning for loving the number 4. By then, my ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia has started to fade, and I could no longer conjure up feelings as strong as they once were towards the number, let alone coming up with a reason why I liked the number so much. Is it the shape? No, 4 looked angular and ugly. Is it because a square had 4 sides? No. I had no particular affinities for squares. At that moment, I wondered to myself why I liked the number 4 so much all this time. Not being able to provide a satisfactory answer, I watched helplessly as said adult smugly declared that I had no good reason to like a bad luck number that signified death, and hence ended my favorite number reign with the number 4.
In high school, my friends and I developed a code system for guys we liked so that we can talk about them without people finding out. I decided to go with the numbering system because it was easy for me. Since odd numbers are male, I decided to label my crushes based on odd numbers. As a result, these numbers took on new identities, so much so that I could hardly remember the old identities they once had for certain numbers as my ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia slowly faded away. Oddly enough, the beginning of puberty also marked the first time I didn’t hate odd numbers as much. Relationships also marked the first time I could no longer stand to look at certain numbers. To this day, the number 23 conjures up feelings of anger and hurt, even though the person associated with the number no longer causes me said feelings.
Today, I’m old enough that synesthesia has been partially replaced by other mechanisms in my brain. When I see my credit card number, I see mathematical relationships between numbers within the sequence. When I remember phone numbers, I see a shape/pattern outlined by the path one would take on a phone when dialing the number. These new mechanisms are weaker, and signs of aging have made me more accident prone in memorizing inaccurate information at times. But my synesthesia hasn’t completely gone away. Synesthesia, this automatic process that I have no control over, still pops up everywhere about 50–75% of the time when I see and use numbers. I don’t know if it will ever completely go away. But I do know that I will miss it if it does.
P.S. I’ve been trying to “exploit” my synesthesia to enhance my language learning abilities. Read more about it here in my post How To Learn Any Language in a Few Months — Language Learning Tips I Gathered Over the Last Few Years from Studying Almost a Dozen Languages.
