h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Reh posting as Fenny again - or Fenny posting as Reh!

Sorry to Other Person - I wasn't being snide! I've been to that thread and posted, but Mandragora's right. It's good for information, but we synaesthetes are getting our kicks from every other thread!

Mandragora (will you hate me if I shorten that to Mandy ) I hope your soldiers were lovely! Soft-boiled yolk is not something I'm keen on, but does "Narcissi under a pale sun on a rainy day" ring any bells?

x x Fenny

No, I won't hate you (lots of people have requested it) but I'd prefer Mandrake, as 'Mandy' is far too pink.
The description was very good. BTW I think your name (Fenny, not Reh) is lavender, what about you?

Thanks Mandrake

I don't have synasthesia-words (I've been trying, but they just look black on white paper). The only exception to this is under direct sunlight, when I'm reading in the garden - then they're actually dark-red (= burned match + dried blood + wine-stain) on the page.

Fenny *sounds* lavender, but that may just be post-posting suggestion. It also reminds me a little of the sound of "Erica", meaning Heather, but again, I may just have thought of this as a result of your post.
Non-synaesthetes (just to explain for your benefit) we may associate different senses, but they're unlikely to be the same ones! To prove a point: an old phone number of mine follows, which appears to me in shades of yellow and green fading to grey... does anyone else see the colours? 346 3289...

x x Fenny (in glorious imagined technicolour)

The ending's grey, definately. It's the 9. The 346 bit is yellow, quite bright, but I see anything with 2 in it as red.

Reh/Fenny

The 346 bit is corn and peas mixed together (sorry - this is lunchtime!) I get a flickering-overall colourswitch, I've never been able to deblend them. 8 and 9 is grey fading to brown. My older phone number (when I was between 2 and 11 years old!) was 883 7780 so you can imagine I saw mainly grey and brown again. 7 is a paler shade of brown (wet sand) than 9, which is pumpernickel (or German Rye Bread) coloured.

No idea about 4 or 5!

x x Fenny

I read recently that it has been established that (beside what is commonly taken as colour blindness) people do see different colours slightly differently. My understanding is that the colour red has at least 2 different interpretations, depending on your genetic makeup.

Also, there is a story about a famous colour-blind scientist called Dalton (discoverer of the atom). He believed that his colour-blindness was caused by a discolouration of the fluid in his eyeball, which tended to absorb some colours while letting others pass through to his retina unaffected. Before he died, he instructed his assistants to open up his eyeball after his death, to verify that this was indeed the case. It wasn't, and it wasn't until many years later they discovered the true cause.

CR

Fenny/Reh

I recollect having a deep and involved conversation about the colour blue when I was sixteen. We sat in someone else's car for about thirty minutes, not giving up our sides,

My point was that although we all called the sky blue, I didn't know that someone else didn't see it subjectively as the colour I would call red. His point missed my point exactly, and he explained repeatedly, and increasingly more stressed-sounding, that artists drew the sky as blue and cameras took pictures which resulted in blue sky, so why should I see anything other than what he saw.

The driver sat there listening to us disputing, with profound patience - more than either of us - with a big grin on his face...

x x Fenny

Well, not many places you can get a conversation like this. But has any of you ever tried making a painting of words? Since you seem to attach words to colors you could maybe do it. Like where the grass is green you just write Erica a lot of times. Would look stupid to a lot of people. And what about those color by numbers thingys. Do you get any special colours when looking at them?

I'm working on something similar in my spare time, a sort of scrapbook with words written as I see them. This is why I want to know how others see their alphabets. I'm using textures too, so I have things like 'b' in smooth grey fur, 'A' as a shape cut out of wire, 'S' made of cheese, etc. Some of them have different colours depending on whether they're capital or lower case- it's probably more to do with shape than sound. (I get different effects from differently-spelled words, too- and I've always been excellent at spelling.)

just recently subscribed to goo,not sure how my perception of the site has changed,but it sure is a nice change.puts on coloured glasses

Goo forever! It's much warmer, more welcoming and has more depth than Alabaster. It's like water- i.e things float on the background or sink gently into it. Whereas white is too stark to be a background colour; it demands attention and makes the screen look like everything's fighting to be at the front.
That's what I think, anyway.

Oh, the subjective color thing! I know exactly what you're talking about! If you're saying what I think you're saying, that what I percieve as what you call white might actually be what you call black, and I just call it white because that's what I've been told things that color are called, and the odd thing is that there's NO WAY OF KNOWING whether this is true or not. I always thought it was a cool idea that everyone has the same favorite color as me, they just didn't know it. I think it would be nice if I was a synaesthete, but I'm not. Just wondering: Do you have colors for symbols, too? Like & and $ and @? What about nonsense symbols? If text is different colors on a web page, can you see both the actual color of the letters and your color at the same time? What color is Twinkle? Sorry to bug you about it, but I just think synaeshtesia is and would like to know more about it from someone who actually has it.

All synaesthetes have their own individual colours etc. So the colours of my alphabet are different from Fenny's, for example.
I have colours for symbols, and colours change depending on whether a letter is upper or lower case. This probably means it's more to do with shape, rather than the sound of a letter. So nonsense symbols would work too; probably better, as they don't have the associations that letters and numbers do.
With me, it's not so much 'seeing' the colours in a physical way, than getting a mental image. However, the image is so strong that it's almost there, but you know it's not an external visual signal. It's like the difference between hearing some music and running a tune through in your mind. When letters are grouped into words, the words have their own colours. Mostly I read too fast to get any lasting images from web-based text, although if I think about it the colours appear.
Twinkle: it starts off a deep, bright green and goes suddenly white at the end. In sound, it is a slidy sort of noise which meanders about and then turns sharply down. If I were to give it an image, it would be going through a dense sunlit forest next to a stream and then having it suddenly give way into a little waterfall with jagged rocks.
I hope that's sufficient, but I like talking about it if you have other questions.

Some more questions: Are the colors different if the letters are in a different font? What about if they're oriented differently, for example if you're looking at them upside-down? Do similarly-shaped letters have different colors? Do you or can you make backwards-correlations between colors and letters, for example thinking of a carpet as being Q-colored? Have you ever arranged jumbles of letters simply because they had colors that went well together? Do you particularly enjoy playing Scrabble?

Er, I meant "do similarly shaped letters have similar colors?" For example, G and C.

Letters in a different font are usually the same basic shape, and they still sound the same. However, if the letters are drastically different (like the 'g' used in newspapers, like two circles with a wiggly line round them) they have other colours.
I find that when I look at upside-down letters, it's hard to see the actual shape rather than the letter- i.e. they're so familiar that you mentally put them right straightaway, and it takes effort to see them as new shapes. If you can detatch from what they 'should' look like, then they are different.
I suppose you could make backwords correlations, because I'd understand what was meant by a Q-coloured carpet. (To me it'd be smooth and on the green side of turquoise.) But as synaesthetes all have different colour associations, we'd all end up arguing that the carpet wasn't Q-coloured at all.
Once letters are arranged into groups they take on another colour; with words I think this is more to do with sound than shape. So the colours of the individual letters aren't retained, but some work particularly well. 'TW' is usually green, but the shade changes depending on the vowel after it. 'Twonk' is yellow, but 'twine' is green.
I don't have any particular affection for Scrabble, but you get what you're given, rather than choosing the letters yourself.

Hey Mandrake - Posting 73 was a brilliant description! I will post more when I've read it again.

Twinkl*: I have a much less alphabetically-defined synaesthesia than Mandragora's, so for example I hear colours and I read numbers in colour, but I've yet to notice many colours in letters. But hearing a very pale lilac is fascinating (although the response to your perception is soul-destroying, when you're five and you ask your mother what colour the phone should make!)

x x Fenny

Hmmm... pale lilac... it sounds quite like mauve, although quieter and more smooth. Sort of whistling, but without the 'ssss' sound. It's quite low-pitched and stays more or less on the same note.
Sorry, getting carried away.
(BTW- I am planning a big illustrative project on synaesthesia. It will include an alphabet with all the letters made out of whatever I see them in, images with their corresponding words, etc. I might go further and include sounds and tastes if I'm feeling ambitious.)

Will that be online? I'd like to see it when you're done.

Wellll.... I could scan it in, s'pose, and make a special website for it but that way you wouldn't get the full multi-sensory effect. Still, it's either that or I exhibit it, which is very unlikely. So that's probably the best course of action.
Not that I've started this yet at all, it's still all in my head with the rubbish.