Are you a Synesthete?

[awanderingbard]

cleolinda posted about synesthesia today. (HERE) and about a request from someone doing a research project on synesthesia to do a test for her research. She's specifically looking for number-colour and letter-colour synesthetes.


If you're all 'I have no idea what you're talking about, Taylor', synesthesia is a condition where you associate one sense with another (example: the drums taste like licorice when you hear them, or when you drink coffee you get the sensation of cement), or you assign personality, colour, location or sense with letters, numbers, weekdays, months or words (examples: Friday is always purple and/or tastes like chocolate and/or is always located somewhat behind you to the right when you think about it and/or is a bit of a flirt). The wiki entry is here if you're still confuzzled (which you probably are as it's something sort of hard to explain).

You can find out if you have synesthesia here and you can do the synesthesia tests there as well. Her request for help is here, with instructions on what she's looking for and how to help her out. It's kind of a fun thing to do, so you might want to check it out. It's like all those popular personality tests that people blog about.

I'm a bit curious about all this myself, now, so here's a poll for my f-list:

[Poll #1287731]

Comments

[joonscribble.livejournal.com]

Oh, awesome.

I have a long lasting fascination with this condition. I've read a bunch of books (fiction and non-fiction alike) and seen a couple of movies that highlight it. It's really quite fascinating. I heartily recommend "The Memory Artists" by Jeffrey Moore as a lovely work of fiction that has a couple of characters with synesthesia.

Patricia Duffy who has this condition and is also an author has written extensively about it as well.

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

The way my life goes is funny sometimes. We were talking about Rufus Sewell, you and I, and about synesthesia. Tonight's episode of Eleventh Hour featured synesthesia as a key clue. Last week the key plot point was one of my major allergies. Is Eleventh Hour stalking me? (Yay!)

Anyway, I have very strong personality-colour synesthesia. People are always colours to me (you used to be yellow, but now you're blue as I've gotten to know you better). I also have a habit of seeing numbers in front and above me, but I don't know if that's synesthesia (I think if it was, it would be more '5 is always two steps to the left') or just my attempts to make math make more sense to me.

[joonscribble.livejournal.com]

When I was little, I used to assign personalities to numbers. Just by the way they looked, I felt they had genders and definite personality traits. But I haven't done that in a long time so I guess I'm no longer even partially synesthete.

Now I need to download that episode of 11th Hour...

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

It's actually the first episode I felt really 'worked'. It didn't feel like Rufus was going to need to go straight home for a nap because he was so exhausted from talking. And there's a couple of really sweet scenes in it. Seriously, give the man a chance to catch his breath and he can do great things.

The episode is called 'Savant'.