Do You Experience Number Forms ?

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Number forms are involuntary mental visualizations that some individuals experience when thinking about sequences like numbers, days, or months. These forms can vary greatly among individuals, often appearing as unique spatial arrangements or colors, and are considered essential by those who have them. It is estimated that only about one in ten people experience these number forms, which can resemble a type of synesthesia. The discussion also touches on Richard Feynman, suggesting that his visual thinking may have influenced his scientific diagrams. Overall, the phenomenon of number forms highlights the diverse ways people conceptualize numerical and temporal information.
  • #151


zoobyshoe said:
That wasn't me, that was Jim McNamara and his "whatever-they-are eelights":

https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=2703729&postcount=58

I beg to differ, from your post #68 in this thread:
I hope you don't mind my saying this is hilarious. They really are like pets, or a herd of bunnies, or a flock of pigeons.

Rhody...
 
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  • #152


rhody said:
I beg to differ, from your post #68 in this thread:


Rhody...

I am expressing understanding of Jim having referred to them as pets.
 
  • #153


zoobyshoe said:
I am expressing understanding of Jim having referred to them as pets.

zooby,

Got it, now I am on the same page. I was thinking literal and you were interpreting. I was missing that part.

Rhody...
 
  • #154


rhody said:
I was thinking literal and you were interpreting.

I wasn't interpreting. Jim literally said he though of them as pets:

jim mcnamara said:
As you can tell I think of them more like cute but annoying pets than anything else.

All I did was express understanding of that.
 
  • #155


zoobyshoe said:
I wasn't interpreting. Jim literally said he though of them as pets:

All I did was express understanding of that.

No big deal, I find it amusing that he thinks that way, at least Jim accepts his number forms and has come to terms with them.

I reread his two posts as well. It must have been frustrating for him to have to keep it to himself all this time.

Rhody...
 
  • #156


Newly published: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262514079/?tag=pfamazon01-20 (or newly republished?)
Amazon.com said:
Product Description
What does it mean to hear music in colors, to taste voices, to see each letter of the alphabet as a different color? These uncommon sensory experiences are examples of synesthesia, when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes' brains that show "crosstalk" between areas of the brain that do not normally communicate. In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature, and recent neurological research.

Van Campen reports that some studies define synesthesia as a brain impairment, a short circuit between two different areas. But synesthetes cannot imagine perceiving in any other way; many claim that synesthesia helps them in daily life. Van Campen investigates just what the function of synesthesia might be and what it might tell us about our own sensory perceptions. He examines the experiences of individual synesthetes—from Patrick, who sees music as images and finds the most beautiful ones spring from the music of Prince, to the schoolgirl Sylvia, who is surprised to learn that not everyone sees the alphabet in colors as she does. And he finds suggestions of synesthesia in the work of Scriabin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Nabokov, Poe, and Baudelaire.

What is synesthesia? It is not, van Campen concludes, an audiovisual performance, a literary technique, an artistic trend, or a metaphor. It is, perhaps, our hidden sense—a way to think visually; a key to our own sensitivity.
 
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  • #157


Knowing a fair amount about Art History, I'd say synesthesia has played a pretty insignificant role.
 
  • #159


Since Nabokov’s synaesthesia has been mentioned a bit, and his work noted for word-play and synaesthetic detail, I’ll mention that I’ve been looking at the risqué plant poetry of Erasmus Darwin, (Grand-father of Galton who wrote of synaesthesia, quoted in the OP, and Grand-father of Charles), also known for contributions to science, including anticipating Lamarck and his Grandson’s evolutionary ideas. His poetry was a national sensation once. With his poetry he said he wished to do for Linneas what Pope had done for Newton. Not drawing any longbows, but it maybe worth mentioning that the first google hit, a Guardian review, describes his work as “almost Nabokovian”.
 
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  • #160


I hadn’t been so interested in number forms before, instead more in colour in cross-modality, but find “concepts” here interesting.

There may be a human capacity predisposed to number. This predisposition is seen in elementary numeracy discrepancy in many animals and in infants, and there is reason to believe that the ability to calculate is an extension of this.

It also seems that number and space are intimately connected. That, say, Arabic numerals are immediately mentally coded in an analogical representation of quantities, and these seem to occur spatially, along a “‘number line’ obeying Fechner’s law”, the direction of this being cultural.

Dehaene speculates that number forms are an unusually enriched version of this spatial-numerical association.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=...23YdQATlvAx2HMjb_J8SRGrS0#v=onepage&q&f=false
from page 41, and page 51.
 
  • #161


zoobyshoe said:
Knowing a fair amount about Art History, I'd say synesthesia has played a pretty insignificant role.

I disagree, but rather than going too far off topic here, I started a different thread in case there are any further comments.
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=404001
 
  • #162


Interesting! I've always experienced this.

For me, numbers are ordered in a very neat line; 1 2 3 4 5 6... etc, with size being uniform up to 20. 20 ~ 30 is more "squeezed together", and the rest of the tens aren't very clear unless I think about them, in which case a group of 10 numbers sort of fill up on a horizontal line in my "mind's eye". Once it gets up to 100, the digits become about two-three times as large. Here, I can for some reason see many more numbers than usual - I can clearly see, for instance, 270 ~ 310, but not 40 ~ 70.

1000 is for some reason smaller again, and it pretty much goes on except in a more "zoomed out" fashion. Once I get up to about a million, I only see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc up to 10, and then there's about as much space between 1 and 10 as between 10 and 100 (million). I have a roughly similar view of billions, but not a very well developed sense of trillions or quadrillions for most likely obvious reasons.

Now, for weekdays, they're ordered a similar way. They're basically ordered on a horizontal line, and I see them as text; Usually mon tue wed thur fri SAT SUN. For some reason, Saturday and Sunday are always larger and more spaced out. A funny thing is that while I don't *see* colors in the image, I still perceive the weekdays as having colors; monday is blue, tuesday is yellow, orange is orange-beige, thursday is brown, friday is green, saturday is yellow, sunday is white.

Let's see... The year. This one is odd. My year goes counter-clockwise in a skewed wheel (the upper part is much larger), starting with January at 6, February at 5, March at 4, April at 3:30, May at 3, June at 2, July at 1, August at 12 (My birthday is in August, probably why), etc until December, which is at 7. They're basically "written" along the "clock" (not an actual clock, just the best way I could describe it) and I can zoom into see the dates ordered up next to each other, usually written above the weekdays, though I don't have a very good sense of dates, to be quite honest. A funny thing is that, and I've never thought of this before, the numbers are actually ordered right-to-left in august and second half of July and they continue this way until December.

Lesse... What more... Years. They're just ordered in a regular fashion like the numbers. Though the 2000's are more "elevated" (like, towards me) than the rest.

I also see words that I hear in front of me. Oh yeah, and when I hear music (voices too, I think) I see it in front of me, kind of like a "chart". If it's singing involved it's more like a jagged line, if it's something like a piano piece I usually see a note sheet in front of me. I also have a tendency to see two hands playing piano whenever I hear piano music, not sure if that's related or just an association.

Oh yeah, the alphabeth.
A B C D E F G H
I J K L M N

After that, it gets complicated. They kind of show up in pairs, O P, Q R, S T, U V, on a vertical line.
then X Y Z Å Ä Ö neatly ordered like the first two lines. I remember that I had much harder learning the letters after N, and I still have to think an extra moment for most of the ones between N and Z; it's not obvious to me that R is before T, for instance.
 
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