Sunday, March 24, 2013

I've been diagnosed.

At the encouragement of my caring friend Britta, today I was evaluated to see if I have a bad case of synesthesia.  And, sure enough, I do.

I don't know how she suspected that I might have the condition, but she was right.  And this isn't just a moderate case of it.  I have synesthesia much worse than the average person.  In fact, the results of the study I participated in today indicate that I have the condition 95.8% of the time.  Goodness gracious.

Synesthesia is a gripping condition where its victim sees numbers, letters, weekdays, and months in color or associated with a particular color.  Synesthesia usually takes ahold of a person beginning at infancy, and it can cause them to "smell" colors, associate people with colors, or to view a sequence (such as the calendar) in a spacial way.  Today, scientists are suspecting that synesthetes are often very artistic individuals who have an uncanny ability to create vivid mental images. 

Here the the results of my evaluation.  As you can see, I definitely associate letters and numbers with specific colors.







Britta explained to me that it doesn't matter WHAT color you associate with a given thing, but rather that you are CONSISTENT in associating that color with the item.  And, according to this test, most of the time I was very, very consistent.

This made me wonder if my color associations were most influenced by a childhood book that my parents used to read to me regularly, and which they recently dropped off for me to read to Liam.  However, there was no correlation.  My color associations seem to be completely unique to me.  :)