What do you think of when...

Every once in awhile when I’m sitting around with someone and we have nothing to do, I like to play a little association game.  I’ll say “Tell me what you think of when I say these two colors,” and I’ll randomly name two colors like pink and yellow, blue and green, gray and red, etc.  It’s interesting to hear peoples’ associations.  For what it’s worth, those colors remind of Easter dresses, a picture of Earth, and Bowser’s Castle in MarioKart.

This nerdy game I play touches on a deeper issue:  the dichotomy of the universality of human senses and the individual way we each experience them.  We all know what the colors black and purple look like, but I might be the only one in the world who associates those two colors with a Lisa Frank folder I had in elementary school.

So color me tickled when I read an article in The New Yorker about a guy named David Eagleman that mentioned a little phenomenon called synesthesia.  A professor of neuroscience at Baylor University in Houston, Eagleman studies the cool stuff we should have studied in our high school science classes.  This particular article tracks Eagleman’s quest to figure out why time seems to slow down whenever something bad is happening to us.  Very interesting.  But I felt most impacted by the parenthetical aside in this paragraph:

Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless, of course, you have synesthesia—another of Eagleman’s obsessions.)

After rolling my eyes at the author of the article for making me feel stupid for not knowing what synesthesia is, I looked it up on Wikipedia:
 

Synesthesia...is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.  People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities.  In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise).

Light bulb!  I am a total synesthete.  It’s August right now, and here’s how August looks in my mind relative to the year:

    March

February               April

January                                May

December                                        June

November                       July

October             August

September

And in school, the grading scale moved from right to left in my mind:
   
    F  D-  D  D+  C-  C  C+  B  B-  B+  A  A-  A+

With wide eyes, I mentioned this to Ian, and he said that he visualizes the TV channels going in different directions, with certain numbers going from from bottom to top, others moving right to left, as if they’re making a square.

Synesthesia is just a grand extension of my color association game.  While the color association game can also show our shared associations (what do you think of with the colors red and green?  Christmas, right?), synesthetes’ perceptions are intensely personal.  Just like the random color combinations.  So even though we may shop at the same stores, drive the same cars, and even export our way of life abroad, our brains won’t let us blend in to the crowd.  Deep down in our thoughts is where we’re our own fierce selves.