by Lauren Goldberg
One of my closest friends just told me this week that he realized that he has synaesthesia. At first I was surprised, because I know that synaesthesia is uncommon, and famous people such as Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Nabakov, and Duke Ellington were said to have it. My friend says that he has always associated letters and numbers with very specific colors, and recently he couldn’t get it out of his mind and decided to do some research. He took the “Synaesthesia Battery” test online, and his results showed that his “symptoms” are consistent with this “psychological phenomenon”. For example, he told me that he sees my name as a sunshine-yellow because that is the color of the letter L and the word “could” was dark blue, “should” was sky blue, and “would” was brown. He also has a very visual response to music–he hears different instruments or tones as coming from below him, behind him, at his chest, etc. When I was talking about this with him today, we were discussing that this may be connected with how well he has always been able to memorize numbers, literary quotes, and names. He is extremely strong in several academic areas, from science, to math, to english, and has an unusually good memory for historical dates and statistics. Are any of these qualities directly related to synaesthesia, and the “unusual connections between different sensory regions of the cerebral cortex” that cause it?
Imaging of connectivity in the synaesthetic brain:
Interesting post! I myself have always had fairly strong associations between letters/numbers and colors, so when you mentioned the battery test I decided to find out if it was the real deal. Turns out that, according to the test, I am somewhat synesthetic (a score of 1 or below is considered synesthetic; I scored an 0.86, which isn’t super-synesthetic but is within the range). According to most sources synesthesia is likely to run in families, which I believe because my sister experiences it as well. In fact, she told me about a less common aspect that she experiences which is known as personification- she can go through the alphabet and describe to me the personalities of each letter as well as how they interact with one another. The interesting thing is that my brother, who was listening to the conversation, told us that he had never experienced anything like what we were talking about, and couldn’t understand what we meant when we said that A’s were red and K’s were purple. Another interesting point is that while both my sister and I were able to identify the color of almost any word suggested to us by our now-interested brother, I found that if I told my sister a word in spanish that she was unfamiliar with, she was unable to give me a color association. So this seems to suggest that meaning might have something to do with synesthetic associations as well.
According to an article in Scientific American
(Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2003), many scientists now believe that synesthesia is a result of a “cross-wiring” in the occipital lobe. When your brain percieves a color, it is first processed in an area called the fusiform gyrus and then transfered to other areas for more sophisticated processing. The same is true for things like numbers- the shape of the number is first identified by the fusiform gyrus, and then other areas take over to process the meaning. Since the fusiform gyrus covers low-level interpretation in both processes, it is likely that the crossover occurs here.
In answer to your question, many studies have suggested that synesthesia can be a useful attribute. According to a study done in Australia (Rich, Bradshaw, and Mattingly, 2004), 24% of synesthetes were involved in artistic pursuits, while only 2% of the general population was. Many synesthetes have reported that their associations help them memorize numbers or spellings of words. One woman told researchers that as a child she remembered how to spell certain words because their color-schemes were similar, and she would know if a letter didn’t belong in a certain word because the color didn’t match up. I personally have managed to put synesthesia to a few good uses- mostly as an aid for remembering numbers. For example, I remember my school ID by dividing the numbers into three sets of three and remembering the color of each set. While I won’t mention the actual number here, I will say that the second set of digits is a light sky blue and the thrid is a yellowish-orange.
Comment by Nick Taylor — September 30, 2007 @ 11:52 am
I don’t doubt that your friend does do better with memorization due to his synaesthesia. Although there is no true experimental data proving the connection between synaesthesia and increased memory, many case studies show that people with the condition tend to have better memorization skills.
Some psychologists hypothesize that imagining numbers in color, even for those without synaesthesia, can act as a memory prompt. A study was done in which 7 non-synaesthetes and one synaesthete were asked to recall black digits and colored digits. (Smilek et al., 2002). The non-synaesthetes recalled 12-62% of the black digits while the synaesthete could remember 66%. Interestingly, the subject with synaesthesia had trouble memorizing the colored words, since the colors the testers applied to the words were disrupting her pre-associated colors (synaesthetes always associate the same words and colors).
Even despite a lack of concrete information on the connection between memory and synaesthesia, one can still look at experiments that deal with color’s affect on memory in non-synaesthetes, since synaesthetes see digits and words in color. For example, a study was done that showed that people remember photos in color better than photos in black and white (Gegenfurtner et al., 2002). Additionally, tests have shown that highlighting texts improves memorization (Gilgour, 2004). The study I found the most fascinating, however, shows that color also improves a person’s recognition of faces (Yip & Sinha. 2002).
With all the connections that have been made between color and memory improvement, it comes as no surprise to me that a person who always connects words with colors has an easier time memorizing dates, facts, and other pieces of information.
http://www.apa.org/releases/incolor.html
http://www.colormatters.com/research.html
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~src/papers/Smilek.PsychSci2002.pdf
http://clearinghouse.missouriwestern.edu/manuscripts/527.asp
http://www.a-levelpsychology.co.uk/online/as/chapter03/memoryforcolour.asp
Comment by Gelsie Isgro — October 10, 2007 @ 10:10 pm