I have heard that it is possible to train people to see the world in this way – and that it might help with dementia. In some ways I wish I’d known earlier, but I was brought up in the 1950s when parents were inside the house and children played at the bottom of the garden, so no one sat down with me and asked why I’d chosen the colours I had when I did a painting. I can’t imagine what it must feel like not to have it, except that it must be rather boring. My friend and I are writing a book and we’ve had to Google a lot of things: new words mean new colours. Each synesthete experiences their own personal colour spectrum.Įven now, at 65, it sometimes surprises me. I remember reading someone else’s story in a book, thinking their colours were different from mine. The Guardian, incidentally, is a mixture of pinky-beige and green. I read the papers every day and about four novels a month, so it certainly hasn’t distracted from my enjoyment of the written word. If I zoomed in and allowed myself to see every single colour, it would be overwhelming. Advertising hoardings, road signs and posters are all brighter and louder to me. But in daily life, words sing out to me everywhere I go. As a furniture designer, it did not have a tremendous bearing on my trade. The associations are involuntary but, in many ways, they are rather like having particularly pleasant muzak on in the background – the colours are always there. If you ask me what 10 years looks like, I will immediately zoom out from a week, like a camera lens. I also have a degree of spatial synesthesia, which means that days of the week, months, years, follow a pattern in my head a sort-of curve. When Jenny told me the names of my granddaughters, each time it was their colours I saw first: Lila is white Ava, her little sister, is green. My other daughter, Katie, is a metallic blue-black and my son Mike’s shade is just a bit lighter – they both have a K, an I and an E. As an adult, I remember buying her narcissus flowers because they were the same yellow as her name. It was my youngest daughter, Jenny, who was most intrigued by it. Processing words is like mixing paints on a palette: C is white, D is beige, E is yellow and so on. I can tell someone the colour of their name instantly. Synesthesia of one sense or another is estimated to affect up to 0.5% of the population and can present itself through taste or hearing music, too. But it is impossible to recognise that you have it until you realise others don’t it was not until that odd moment in the art studio that I started to question whether a rainbow alphabet was the norm.Īfter the conversation with my tutor, I started to talk to people about it, but they didn’t understand and I soon stopped because they clearly thought it was nonsense.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |