synesthesia, some people perceive individual symbols, characters, numbers

ViewsofMars

Hi Rhody. I don't have synesthesia, but have enjoyed contributing to this topic. It's always fun to explore and learn. I reviewed your link to "post #93" and you did mention, " 3. More women than men have it, or at least are reported to admit having it."

I am a woman but that is irrelevant. Your statement isn't a scientific statement so therefore isn't quite correct. But I must say I really do love your enthusiam and zest for life. You seem to want to help people, which is to me a very important quality of being human.

I'd like to add a little more information to this topic and will only submit the abstract.

rhody

ViewsofMars,

Thanks for the constructive criticism, how would you rephrase the statement to be more scientific ?

Second, thanks for the complement, to be honest, if it weren't for zooby I wouldn't be writing this at all, thanks for Dr Cytowic's book that started this little adventure, "The Man Who Tasted Shapes", and thanks for your insight and contributions.

I found a free pdf copy of: Magnetoencephalography reveals early activation of V4 in grapheme-color synesthesia and plan to give it a look when I get a chance. Right now I have a bit of a dilemma, the new topic I am researching is cool but taking a lot of time, but I still want to keep up with new findings in this post. What is even better is that in researching it, there are other concepts that I didn't even know existed until I began with it. I never try to "drill down" more than three levels at one time because I have to grasp the main concept(s) before branching. I don't know if any of you do this, but I open a draft e-mail and include links and short phrases by category while doing research. I have google g-mail where ever I go and can easily add to the draft with the links and notes. It makes things so much easier to organize and then post. The hardest thing for me is to select those key points that tie things together, then, make if flow.

Rhody...

Edit: 6/23
That's funny, for a long time I thought I was part alien/extraterrestrial, lol...

fuzzyfelt

Included in the explanation of my last post here would be evidence of typical early cortical interactions and other cross-modal interactions with feed-forward/feed-back possibilities, not restricted by requirements of sensory deprivation. Included here are more recent papers-

"These findings demonstrate that audiovisual integration and spatial attention jointly interact to influence activity in an extensive network of brain areas, including associative regions, early sensory-specific visual cortex and subcortical structures that together contribute to the perception of a fused audiovisual percept."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19302160 (Oxford Journals Cerebral Cortex)

"Both the topography and timing of these interactions are consistent with multisensory integration early in the cortical processing hierarchy, in brain regions traditionally held to be unisensory.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10978694"

"our study demonstrates that even short-term crossmodal training of novel AV associations results in integration-related cortical plasticity and training-induced congruency effects for artificial AV stimuli in cortical regions especially of the frontal and (to a lesser degree) the temporal lobes, adding novel aspects to the understanding of object-related AV integration in the human brain."
http://ukpmc.ac.uk/classic/articlere...=1765134#bib11

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...0b7eeb73cb7a00

This may add clarity to the assessment of findings here and to an assessment of speculations concerning different pathways, to explain “higher” and “lower” synaesthete variations which Ramachandran has written of (although there are changes with the new paper that VoM has linked to) generally applied to "associator" and "projector" types.-

“In lower synesthetes, we suggest that crossactivation may occur between adjacent regions of the fusiform gyrus involved in letter recognition and color processing, whereas higher synesthesia may arise from crossactivation in the parietal cortex, particularly in the region of the angular gyrus, the ventral intraparietal area, and the lateral intraparietal area (Hubbard et al., 2005b).
http://www.unicog.org/publications/H...onReview05.pdf “
(Posted in Post #87, and referred to subsequently.)




This is very interesting, thanks VoM!

Interestingly it only tests the "projectors" (of grapheme-colour) which had been generally termed "lower" synaesthetes. Also interesting that the cross-activation results have been interpreted, following Dehaene, to incorporate hierarchical feature ananlysis processes, and that this is mentioned as occurring at the grapheme level and other levels with excitatory and inhibitory connections, both bottom-up and top-down, and allows for other processes beyond the early cross-activation implicated in the study. The paper states the critical next move is further research of “associator synesthetes” . Also further investigation of “the extent to which the cascaded cross-tuning model of synesthesia applies to other variants of the condition or instances of acquired synesthesia” is required. Interesting that the terms “projector” and “associator” are used here.


Regarding posts about new synaesthetic responses, it is also interesting to note that the paper also mentions that during the component stage of this processing would be the provision of a “putative mechanism for the acquisition of new synesthetic percepts”.

rhody

Fuzzy,
and
This is very cool stuff, a further parsing, identification, localization, association and labeling of the synesthesia experience. So far, we recognize, upper, lower, projector, associator, implicit (not experienced but showing activation on scans), explicit (experienced and reported), bi-directional, bottom up (perceptual), involvement of early pre-attentive processes, involvement in later attentive processes, possible cross-activation, possible simultaneous activation, possible cross tuning model.

Crap, I gave myself a headache trying to condense it. I am sure I missed some descriptions !!! lol. It must be the computer science nerd in me trying to reduce all of it into data structures. You can see what I am trying to do here, take a step back, condense, consolidate.

I have been trying to find accurate graphics and or videos where the "normal" five senses (in a non-senesthetic individual) are thought to be processed for perspective. So far haven't come up with a good set of graphs and/or videos to address this. It would be nice to have for discussion and reference. I will keep looking.

Rhody...

ViewsofMars

I'll make it fast since I have a project to finish up. I think my last two postings from the previous page provided valuable information, especially "A Whole-Genome Scan and Fine-Mapping Linkage Study of Auditory-Visual Synesthesia Reveals Evidence of Linkage to Chromosomes 2q24, 5q33, 6p12, and 12p12."

Let's look at this scenerio: A child grows up with a parent that has synesthesia. Don't you think the parent has a major influence on how the child perceives his/her environment? I do.

Here are two items for thought which you can explore. I have provided a snippet from each. They are from The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders -"The National Institutes of Health—The Nation's Medical Research Agency—includes 27 institutes and centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments and cures for both common and rare diseases." Here are two snippets:

1. "Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl is the William P. and Ruth Gerberding Professor at the University of Washington and the Co-Director of the UW Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning.

"Her research has focused on the study of language and the processing of language by the brain. The work has played a major role in demonstrating how early exposure to language alters the mechanisms of perception. The work has broad implications for critical periods in development, for bilingual education and reading readiness, for early brain development, and for research on computer understanding of spoken language.

"In 1997, Dr. Kuhl was awarded the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America. In 1998, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And in 1999, she became President of the Acoustical Society of America, and received the University of Washington's Faculty Lectureship Award.

"Dr. Kuhl was one of six scientists invited to the White House in 1997 to make a presentation at President and Mrs. Clinton's Conference on "Early Learning and the Brain." In 2001, she was one of three scientists invited to make a presentation at President and Mrs. Bush's White House Summit on "Early Cognitive Development: Ready to Read, Ready to Learn." Her work has been widely covered by the press. In 1999, she co-authored The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn (Morrow Press)."
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/news/meetin...guage/kuhl.asp

2. “Smounds” Delicious! Smell and Sound Converge in a Little-Known Part of the Brain
"Recent NIDCD-sponsored research shows that cells in a part of the brain called the olfactory tubercle not only discriminate odors -- they also respond to sound. Scientists found that 65 percent of tubercle cells were activated by at least one of five odors. In the same area, about 20 percent of cells were activated by an audio tone. Further, 29 percent of the cells had either an enhanced or suppressed response to different mixes of odors and tones, depending on whether or not the tone was present with the odor. This discovery may provide the first neural evidence for a sensory crossover in the brain where smell and sound converge. It could also help explain clinical reports of sound-smell synesthesia (in which someone “smells” sounds), as well as the ability to relate auditory pitch with specific odors. It also brings to light a relatively unexplored area of the brain that could play a key role in conditions which are accompanied by disorders of sensory processing, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease."
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/news/releases/10/04_19_10.htm

Also, I would like to mention if someone is experiencing symptoms of synesthesia then he/she should consult a doctor.

I realize that I have another topic on another forum. Hope to return to that tomorrow. I have to admit I like it hanging up there.

rhody

VOM,

Sound, smell convergence, I understand what you are saying 65% of cells respond to one of 5 odors, and about 1/3rd of those same cells respond to audio, and that 29% had enhanced/suppressed to a mix of smell and sound, which explains the "crossover effect". I fully get that. I have a few questions, first the short finding in the link provided was done by: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), and I believe on a population of test subjects which which may include non-synesthetes and synesthetes alike. How do we know if they were synesthetes or not unless they were tested independently for smell/sound synesthesia before taking the test with results presented here ?

I will answer your question by asking another, you said, " I would like to mention if someone is experiencing symptoms of synesthesia then he/she should consult a doctor." to which I respond, why don't you ask waht or chi meson who are following this thread if they feel they need to see a doctor about their form of synesthesia, and if it in any way inhibits their normal daily lives ?

Lastly, you said, "It also brings to light a relatively unexplored area of the brain that could play a key role in conditions which are accompanied by disorders of sensory processing, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease." I don't know how having sound/smell synesthesia correlates to having schizophrenia or alzheimer's disease. I would like to see hard evidence, in the absence of which I would tend to doubt it.

I am not a research scientist but do not believe that the most common forms of synesthesia are "disorders". See quote from zooby in post #153 above:
Rhody...

Rasalhague

Hey, cool, a synaesthesia thread!

I have fixed colour associations for letters, numbers, days, months, compass directions and the concepts of left and right. I associate triangles, squares etc. with the colour corresponding to the number of their sides. Like Waht, my A is yellow. My B is a very dark maroon. But we differ on C. Mine is light green.

When I look at a page of writing and I’m not particularly thinking about the individual letters, I don’t see bright and distinct colours superimposed on each letter. But as soon as I let my attention drift from the meaning to the shapes of the letters, I can’t help becoming aware of their “natural” colours: not projected over the real colours in a way that blots out the real colours with imagined ones, but somehow “present together with” the real colours in my mind’s eye, sometimes more strongly present than at other times.

I’m probably not explaining it very well, but I hope my clumsiness of expression doesn’t make it sound too exotic or ineffably mysterious! It’s similar to the way I can picture a scene from memory or imagine something while looking at a real scene without getting the two mixed up, except that the real letters localise the colours somehow, and these colour associations are regular, automatic and spontaneous, compared to the freeform nature of other kinds of associations. If I think of a letter without looking at one, it tends to have its own synaesthetic colour by default, especially if I only think of a fairly abstract idea of the letter without imagining an example of it written down, in which case I can picture it how I choose, although I’ll probably still have a lingering impression of its synaesthetic colour.
For me, yellow is an aspect or attribute of A, part of its nature, and a blue A is an A in disguise! An A in drag?! When I think of the idea now, I have to make a conscious effort to banish the impression of yellow, otherwise saying “a blue A” creates a similar visual impression to “a blue yellow”--I see both colours.

If I need two Greek letters to represent angles, I prefer not to use the traditional theta and phi, as these are both a smoky blue colour, albeit theta a little lighter than the pigeon-blue phi. Alpha and beta, which--like most of the Greek alphabet--have the same colours as their Roman counterparts make a much better contrast. (I should say my first language is English.) A while ago I watched a video--The Mechanical Universe?--that showed electrons as blue and protons as red, the opposite of the colours I associate with the letters E and P. I found this mildly distracting; it meant I had to concentrate slightly harder. It just felt like they were the “wrong” colours. Other than that sort of thing, it’s no trouble.
These colour associations can be handy for recalling numbers or letters, although occasionally if I’m trying to remember a name, say, I might guess it begins with a K when really it begins with T, which are slightly different shades of dark green. “Oh, T,” I think when I find out, “well, I knew it was something green...”

*

My first memory of these associations is from when I was about six and writing on the cover of a school project, being careful to use the right coloured crayon, or the best match, for each letter. I didn’t think there was anything exceptional about this. I didn’t think much about it, and it wasn’t till I was 16 that it occurred to me to ask whether other people had a similar experience. My siblings do. My parents don’t. My siblings have different associations for letters, numbers etc. to me. I first heard the word synaesthesia when I was 19. I never knew there was a word for it till then.

I haven’t followed up on many of the links yet, but I was particularly intrigued by the abstract of Simner et al. (2008) ‘Non-random associations of graphemes to colours in synaesthetic and non-synaesthetic populations’, Cognitive Neuropsychology 22:8 [ http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...43290500200122
]. One of the first things I did when I got to thinking about these associations, was to collect lists from people of their colour associations, and the few I got seemed pretty random on casual inspection. I don’t think I really realised, at the time, that not everyone has a special fixed set of associations. I just assumed at first that everyone had it, more or less--which undermined the exercise a bit.

*

I have strong individual colour associations for each of the single digits, and ten is a clear amber colour, eleven is white like 1, and 12 is a paler, more muted blue than two. Beyond that, the colour of the number depends on those of the digits it’s made of. I was intrigued by the mention from Rhody’s anonymous correspondent in #175 of “letter/number-color-gender” as I also think of numbers as having gender. Some are more sharply distinguished in this way than others. By default, I think of odd numbers as female, but there are some exceptions that are male, and some that could be either. (I’m male myself.) When I was 7 or 8, I used to draw comics in which all the characters were numbers and had their own personalities.

Sadly I’m not aware of any convenient encoding of sophisticated mathematical relationships in my colours for numbers, such as Daniel Tammet describes. I don’t have any special connection such as Waht mentioned between numbers and their squares. When I read StarkRG’s comments on the first page of this thread about adding colours, I was all ready to say it didn’t work like that for me, but weirdly, when I got to thinking about it, I noticed the following correspondences:

3+4=7
RED+YELLOW=ORANGE

2+4=6
BLUE+YELLOW=GREY-GREEN

2+3=5
BLUE+RED=VERY DARK BLUE/BLACK/PURPLE

Oh, and arguably, 3+3+3=9 (RED+RED+RED=DARK RED), if you think of three as a translucent liquid like wine getting darker as more of it is poured into a glass. Which is nice... but in general, the sum of my colours is not the colour of my sums!

When it comes to whole words, with me too, as with Waht, the colour of the initial letter usually predominates. My first, quickest, strongest, readiest association for colour words such as RED, GREEN, BLUE depends on the meaning. That’s the association I have when I just glance at the word or think of it as a whole without paying much attention. But as I look now at the letters I’ve just typed, paying more attention to them, I can’t help but “see” the colours of individual letters emerging.

R, yellow
E, reddish orange
D, black

G, dark, greyish brown
R, yellow
E, reddish orange
E, reddish orange
N, dark red

B, dark maroon
L, white
U, dark grey
E, reddish orange

I suppose it’s a bit like looking at a wire-frame drawing of a cube and seeing one corner as alternately concave or convex, I can switch perspectives by either focusing on the word as a whole, or considering its letters. That said, writing them all out vertically like this does bring out the colours of the individual letters more and make it harder to see picture the colour of the word as a whole without the colours of the letters intruding.

*

Sometimes when I’m on the verge of falling asleep, I’ll either experience a small muscle twitch or hear some small real noise, such as a creak or a click, which triggers a very short flash of visual experience, most often like a burst of TV snow.

I often have coloured reveries while listening to music, but in a freeform and voluntary way. I don’t know anything technical about music, and I don’t have colour associations with particular notes, apart from their letter names, but I do have a looser tendency to think of high notes as light, bright, small, sharp and cold/hot, while low notes are dark and big and warm. (But I don’t think that’s uncommon.) Some music gives me tingles [ http://www.cogsci.msu.edu/DSS/2008-2...ronFrisson.pdf ].

I like to speculate: if this smell, sound etc. was a colour or texture... But again, that's a voluntary and playful thing for fun and curiosity, and not like the automatic associations I have between colours and things like letters. Not that they aren’t fun and curious too!

ViewsofMars

""

Rhody, you can call me Mars. It's a nickname given to me by a very famous scientist. The handle I use "ViewsofMars" means Observations (Views=Observations so I used it since it was a shorter word) of Mars. And, I don't think you do understand. I NEVER said, "65%...."


""

I don't need to ask waht or chi meson. I'm following house rules here on Physics Forums - Forum: Medical Sciences due to the fact that synesthesia is considered to be a medical - communication disorder. You can review all that scientific research I have presented. If anyone has symptoms and are wondering what is happening then obviously they should consult his/her doctor for evaluation.

""

Again I must repeat to you, Rhody, I did not say, "It also brings...."

""

Yes, I realize you aren't a research scientist. Member zooby talks a lot. I support the The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders -"The National Institutes of Health—The Nation's Medical Research Agency—includes 27 institutes and centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments and cures for both common and rare diseases."

I'll move onto another topic. I've provided enough information between this page and the previous one.

P.S. Welcome Rasalhague. Thanks for sharing.

fuzzyfelt

Thanks Rhody, you mentioned some things that really interest me.

There do seem many variations, and I really appreciate the condensation and will try to add to that myself, (of course, these are not necessarily all exclusive)- rare/not rare (e.g. number/spatial forms), congenital/acquired (e.g. cortical plasticity), sensory/conceptual or innate/ emotional (personification etc.), individual/universal (e.g. Dehaene’s SNARC, kiki-Bouba, Day’s take on Berlin and Kay’s colour theory- http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/trends.html
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...43290500200122), probably more, and also, terms- “To date, a plethora of terms have been used in the context of crossmodal research (‘heteromodal’, ‘multimodal’, ‘intersensory’, ‘polysensory’, ‘multisensory’, ‘amodal’, ‘supramodal’, ‘modality-specific’, ‘unimodal’, etc.).-2001
http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/cgi...ull/11/12/1110


By the way, I didn’t manage to sign myself into the site to read your link ( Multiple dimensions in bi-directional synesthesia )
about bi-directional dimensions, and found another from 2007-
http://www.apn.psy.unibe.ch/unibe/ph...n_2007_ger.pdf
It states that a unidirectional colour experience occurred at a subjective level, but a bimodal concurrence existed at a performance level. Only associator synaesthetes were tested. Is that similar?

fuzzyfelt

I don't believe there is total agreement about these "normal" five senses, and more,
given this thread, you may need to be even more precise about what is the “ normal” senses you are looking for :).

To elaborate, my selection may be biased because this is what I’ve been looking at, but this more typical mingling of senses has been called ubiquitous, with an explosion of research away from the traditional view of isolated modes, or-

“Indeed, the multisensory nature of most, possibly all, of the neocortex forces us to abandon the notion that the senses ever operate independently during real-world
cognition.”

( http://webscript.princeton.edu/~asif...der%202006.pdf
http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/cgi...ull/11/12/1110
http://ukpmc.ac.uk/classic/articlere...cid=PMC2427054 )

fuzzyfelt

This has been linked to before in this thread, in post #169, and discussed a bit, for example, in post #173, if interested.

fuzzyfelt

Thanks for the fantastic post!



And thanks for the fantastic links!

waht

Rasalhague, welcome to the elite club

Your post is a fascinating insight into a synesthesia perspective.

Nice. I counted the occurrence of most common colors of letters that I perceive in the alphabet. And the distribution is: there is seven shades of yellow, five shades of white, and four shades of red, and three of brown all spread throughout the alphabet. The remaining few letters take on more cooler colors: green, blue, purple, and black.

Yes, same thing happens. I realized though that a thought of a letter triggers the color experience. If I close my eyes, and think about a letter, a color jolt occurs.

When I look a blue A, this is I think a what happens. The visual part of the brain immediately registers a blue color faster than the time it takes for another part of the brain to covert the visual symbol of the letter into an abstract thought which in turn triggers the synesthesia color experience. So in a sense a resonance effect occurs, which is flipping back and forth between the color perceptions that are separated by a small time delay.

As Zooby suggested to check out the effects of grapheme synesthesia on different colors of font, and background. I found that the time delay gets noticeably longer with more flamboyant font color, and darker background.


Yup, most of the Greek alphabet is isomorphic synesthesially speaking to the Roman alphabet, with an exception of few letters. Gamma is still same as 'c' , delta is same is 'd' or phi is same as 'p' - which is why I think that the visual processing of the geometry of symbols like lines, curves gets translated into a thought first, and then a color experience occurs from the thought.

So I look at a triangle letter, and think to myself "aha, that's a delta." And immediately a 'd' follows from the first word "delta" and hence I get a color experience of 'd'.

Weird one is gamma. I should get a color experience for 'g' but instead I get a color for 'c' a third letter of the alphabet as is gamma.

That's a correct addition of color. For me it's yellow + red = white.

Yes indeed. The first letter sets the color of the rest of a word. But there are few exceptions in days, months, shapes, or directions that don't follow this pattern. There is a unique color for most of those.

Monday is same color as 'm' but Wednesday is different color than a 'w'.

zoobyshoe

Quote for us exactly where it's defined as a "medical-communication disorder".

rhody

Fuzzy thanks for the link, in response to your question, see below:
You really should try to sign up and download the other paper, PM me if you like and I will walk you through the process.
The paper you provided is concerned with conditioned responses that "fire back" in bi-directional cross activation. This is for people who experience synesthesia in "the minds eye" referred to as associators. In a nutshell, what was found was a new way to test whether disasociations between conscious experience of synesthesia, and unconscious co-activation of synesthesia (by the unexpected "startle response" in synesthetes versus control individuals (who did not exhibit the startle response).

The method used to condition the "startle response" was as follows. They used skin conductive response to measure the startle reaction response. Blue was selected for synesthete's who would normally see blue when presented with a white box with the letter "A" in it. (see attached thumbnail). Test subjects were shown three colors at timed intervals (2 second exposure, then a rest period, 10 to 20 seconds to allow the skin conductive response to return to normal), when blue was shown, a boat horn with 100 db serving as the unconditioned stimulus. Red, blue and green squares were used to condition the startle response. The results implicate when the startle response was associated with the "real color", an association between the shock and grapheme (in the synesthetes's minds eye) was established. Results showed that during the conditioning phases the synesthetes would respond to the white box with the A in it as if they had been startled by the boat horn, whereas the controls did not respond. This processing is thought to occur in higher parietal cortex, particularly the angular gyrus.

Compared to the other paper: "Multiple dimensions in bi-directional synesthesia", which used EEG measured event-related potentials, they were comparing associators (in the mind's eye) versus projectors (visualized in space), and synesthetes with a larger priming effect observed in the frontal and parietal electrode areas and another group in the frontal areas only. The results indicate that bi-directional activity for associator synesthetes, and that a disassociation between associator's and projectors was present. These results also show that for the first time, similar neural mechanism's underlie bi-directional synesthesia in synesthete's that do not report a synesthetic experience of a grapheme when a color is presented.

Note: Mingling terms: associator/projector in the first paper and explicit/implicit and higher/lower as one in the same thing (current thinking as of 2005) suggested by Dixon & Smilek in the second paper drove me a little nuts (no, try a lot nuts ! lol) trying to compare the two. To me, apples are apples and oranges are oranges and never the two shall meet, as a result I may have made interpretation errors in translation.

Rhody...

P.S.

I want to reread the dialog between Rasalhague and waht comparing their experiences. However, I am too tired at this point, at quick glance there may be some of their experience that is in agreement with the experiments discussed above, especially the associator parts. I will give that a harder look tomorrow, I want to do it with a fresh mind. I am toast right now.

Attached Thumbnails

 

rhody

Fuzzy,

You asked:
By senses, I meant, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and balance (edit: added 6/24, 12:34pm). What I was trying to convey, unsuccessfully was that it would be nice to have a mapping of the brain areas and descriptions of stimulus where each sense is perceived non-synesthetically under baseline test conditions.

Second, a collection of brain activation areas and descriptions where forms of synesthesia have been tested and reported. Sort of a living library if you like. Some of the paper's I have read provide a graph or two to indicate activation areas. Obviously, test conditions and technologies used to measure the synesthetic responses vary for each individual. A collection of links would suffice due to copyright issues to protect the researcher and his work.

Rhody...

Rasalhague

Heh, heh, thanks. Don't look now though, I think there's people studying us!

And thanks to everyone else for your kind comments on my ramblings...

Interesting... I have 5 shades of red (three dark, one medium and rosy/reddish-orange/vermillion sort of a colour), 4 shades each of yellow and green, and 4 identical whites (in contrast to my numbers where the two white digits are different shades). Less common colours include some light-coloured ones: the translucent quartzlike pink i, amber/peach q, orange f, besides a brown, a middle-of-the-road blue (dark blue rather than light, but not murkily so), two shades of very dark grey, a black and one metallic.

My gamma is dark brown like g, but a bit darker and greyer. Phi is more like p than f. For me, the exception is theta, which has this pale smoky grey-blue colour, unlike my dark green t. The Old English / Icelandic / runic letter "thorn" has the same colour as theta [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29 ], as does Tuesday. But, just to be awkward, Thursday is a different kind of pale grey.

I wasn't expecting to find any, so I was quite excited to find those three. But I can't see how it could work in general.

Same here. East and south match their initial letters, but north and west do their own thing, espcially west which is nothing like any of its individual letters. The months are a similar mixture of ones with colours that match the initial letter, such as January and December, and others like June, September and November that diverge.

My Wednesday is orange, more like its second letter than it's first, although more f-coloured really. Monday is black, possibly due to the /u/ sound.

Incidentally, when I started school, for the first year, we were taught an experimental phonetic spelling system called ITA, Initial Teaching Alphabet [ http://www.itafoundation.org/alphabet.htm ], [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1523708.stm ]. But I can't remember whether I had any colour associations at that time. When I look at the ITA alphabet now, I have all the associations I would have for the corresponding normal letters.

*

The abstract I mentioned was a bit ambiguous (and I don't have access to the full article), but I think they meant they found a correspondence between the frequency with which a colour occurs in a synaesthete's alphabet and the frequency of the corresponding colour term (the word)--rather than the frequency of the colour, since these colours aren't all pure colours and have other distinguishing features besides frequency.

Anyway, here are some charts I made, inspired by that idea. In the one on the right, letters of the alphabet arranged by frequency, compared to the frequency of occurrence of the English colour terms from the set { orange, pink, yellow, silver, silver, grey, brown, green, red, white, black } which I judged the best match for the synaesthetic colours I associate with them. Letter frequencies from Wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency ]. Frequency of colour terms from BNC [ http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ ].

In the bar chart, colour words from left to right in order of increasing frequency versus how often a colour in that range occurs in my alphabet. As mentioned, except for white, multiple occurrences include several different shades. In some cases, the choice of which colour to include where is a bit arbitrary. Also what to call them (silver?, metallic?). To simplify that, I chose colour terms that I'd have known at the age I was first aware of these associations. More obscure and precise terms would make some of them arbitrarily very infrequent. Another problem is that some of these terms denote other things besides a colour. Not all that revealing, perhaps, but at least it gave me some practice learning how to do graphs in Mathematica.

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