I Didn’t Know I Had Synesthesia Until I Was 18
My experience finding out not everyone saw a rainbow in their math homework each night.
For anyone who is unfamiliar with the psychological phenomena, synesthesia is a sensory experience in which two senses are combined or overlapping. In other words, an individual with synesthesia (known as a synesthete) can hear colors or taste sounds. Synesthesia comes in many different shapes and sizes but for me, I see color in almost all letters and numbers. While it may sound like it, my eyes do not swap out the black color of letters on a page for a different color. Rather, synesthesia operates on the basis of association. For example, I associate the letter “a” with yellow and the letter “d” with blue. It is important to note the color-associations between letters, numbers, and colors do not change. A synesthete who thinks of an “a” as yellow will always associate an “a” with yellow. This form of synesthesia is known as grapheme-color synesthesia and it is my crazy reality.
You would think such an incredible and unique sensory experience would be something people figure out early on in life but oftentimes, this is not the case. Because it is an internal sensory experience, it is easy to assume everyone else takes in the world the exact way. Take bacon for example–you assume that bacon smells the same to me as it does to you, right? So why would I assume people read letters differently than I do? It takes a level of meta-thinking that does not usually surface naturally.
I was indirectly prompted to consider my mental processes my senior year of high school but not in the way you may think. During lunch, I walked in on a heated conversation between some friends regarding which subjects to use what color notebook. “Math is definitely green.” “Are you kidding me, it’s red!” This conversation lasted the majority of the lunch period and I found myself getting increasingly frustrated with my friends’ answers. I knew in my bones science was the green subject and english was the yellow subject. I knew of course that a topic like this was technically without a correct answer, but my unexplainable frustration was what grabbed my attention. Why was I so upset about something as simple as this? My friends were allowed to have different opinions on which color notebooks they used for their classes but I felt so deeply I was more correct than they were. My frustration was the first step in a wakeup call to the fact that maybe I did not think in the same way as everyone else.
Naturally, I could not let this conversation go and considered it over and over again. Why did I feel so strongly that math was a red subject? The more I thought about it the quicker I realized it did not have anything to do with the subject but rather the letters composing the word “math.” M, a, t, and h. Each of these letters are associated with different colors in my mind including the letter “m” with the color red (note: synesthetes often describe how the first letter in a word stands out more than the rest. In my case, the first letter being an “m” matters the most in terms of color association for the entire word). At this moment, all the pieces began to fall into place. I remember going through the alphabet in my head and recognizing which letters were associated with what color.
Hearing about this experience I can imagine you are left with this question: how did I not know? How did I not realize that every time I think about a letter or number it elicits a color in my mind? Like I said before, you probably do not sit down and think about the way you think very often. I was never aware that my brain thought in this way, it just did. I also never wondered whether my mind worked differently than anyone else. I had made it to my senior year in high school without any major issues so why question it so late in the game?
After extensive googling and taking a series of tests from home, it became quite clear to me that synesthesia was the answer to my questions. Math was a red subject because “m” was a red letter. My friends were not as passionate about their ‘notebook color choices’ because they did not experience the world in the same way I did. And finally, I was not the only one who had such a colorful perspective on the world. Other people around the world had the same types of associations I did. Today as a college student, I am left wondering if there are ways I can use synesthesia to my advantage, how I may have developed it, and why there is so little research on these dynamic experiences.
