Talk:Grapheme–color synesthesia

Just a random thought on associations

Regarding the idea that some synesthetic colors are are based on associative learning, like refridgerator magnets, and noting the slight correlation of synesthetic colors to magnet colors, do you think that the opposite conclusion might be true? That its not that synesthetes are learning from magnets, but that the magents were created originally by a synesthete who was just making magnets the same colors that they perceived the letters? Maybe there is a neurological basis for 'average' color associations, of which both the 'associative learners' and the 'magnet makers' both belong?

Anyway, just a random thought. Phidauex 22:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, it's possible, but at this point, we just can't tell. In her study, Anina Rich looked at a bunch of children's books (in Australia), and found that many of them don't contain colored letters and numbers. Similarly, Nabokov notes that the colors of the blocks he played with when he was a child were "wrong" (this is how his synesthesia came to his mother's attention, see Speak Memory). One useful piece of data, which is just starting to appear (but not yet citable) is data similar to the Simner et al. data in German. Other languages would also be needed to really round this out, but it's something people are looking into. Edhubbard 22:38, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

In another line of thinking, what is your "vision" or outline for this page? I was thinking about some of the stuff on the main page, but it would be redundant. On the other hand, much of the stuff on the main page is about grapheme-color synesthesia. Edhubbard 22:38, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, the Synesthesia page is about 33kb right now. Its not too long, but it shouldn't get a whole lot longer. If everything were on that page, it would be too long, so it makes sense to use 'summary style', where we have headings that briefly summarize a topic and then direct readers to the main article on the topic, like we've done with the history of synesthesia research article. My eventual thought is that the synesthesia article will have subheadings describing various forms of synesthesia, and a summary of research and individual reports. In the case of obscure or rare ones, like color -> taste, the summary may be all there is, but for better researched, or more famous types, like grapheme -> color, there would be a sub-article.

In the specific case of this article, my outline idea was something like:

• Lead
• History as it relates to grapheme -> color synesthesia
• Subjective or notable reports
• Grapheme -> color specific research (like the computer interface research, and your work)

It won't be a long article, and eventually, a summary of it will appear in the main synesthesia article along with a link to the subarticle. Of course, any of this could change at any time, this is just my general thought. Phidauex 00:21, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I like that idea. When I added yet another link in the lрead, concerning yet another form of synesthesia (personifications), I was starting to feel like that was also in danger of getting unwieldy. Perhaps a little more, and we'll have to make a list so that people can see the different forms. Edhubbard 01:04, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

non-latin colour synaesthesia?

Aside from numbers, nothing seems to have been mentioned abut whether, for instance, Arabs, Japanese, Russians, Greeks, Chinese, Thais, Koreans and so experience this phenomenon.

While I would assume they do, I don't know it for a fact.

Anyone? 75.28.41.156 14:09, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

As of yet, there is no research on this topic with native speakers, although I know of several ongoing projects, in particular a project headed by Julia Simner at the University of Edinburgh to study synesthesia in Chinese readers. In addition, Patricia Lynn Duffy discusses her experiences of acquiring synesthesia for Chinese pictograms while working there for the United Nations, in her book Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens. Finally, there are a couple of studies by Carol Mills which have discussed a synesthete who first learned to read Cyrillic, but these do not focus on the linguistic differences, and mostly use the Roman alphabet in their experiments. Although there are a few studies, there is little that is really systematic. With a couple of more studies, it might be worth writing a whole section on this. Edhubbard 02:00, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

I've taught myself both the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets at around the age of 16 and my colors tended to "transfer" to the new language. If the symbol was the same, however, for different sounds (Cyrillic "B" is pronounced "v"), it kept its color. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.76.166.30 (talk) 23:24, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I taught myself Greek when I was around 10 and I used to read the dictionary (my dictionary had 4 different alphabets under the word "alphabet") and phi turned like a yellow-orange mix cause of the P-H combo. Beta stayed orange, and alpha stayed blue. Dagron12345 01:29, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Greek Eta looks grey to me, just like Latin H, no matter that they are two different sounds :) Arabic letters don't have any colors at all. Maybe because I don't read them often. (I can read the letters but don't understand the language.) – Alensha ^talk 17:24, 19 December 2008 (UTC)ks

The Letter 'P' always looks dark blus to me. so i always persieve words beginning with 'p' as dark blue, I am learning russian and the word rooskii (russian for russian) always appears dark blue to me aswell because in russian it is written Руссқий. р looking like p.

It's the same for the Greek alphabet. I always colored the letters of my name as a child to match the specific colors they had in my mind. α is red, ε is green, η, ι and υ are different shades of yellow, even though they sound exactly the same. When I learned english, "a" remained red (as α), "e" remained green (as ε), and u has similar color with υ... Plus, ζ (z) has a really weird dark color which I cannot decribe.... 03:48, 5 May 2012 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.131.80.154 (talk)

Image

The image is somewhat misleading, as one might think a synesthete sees the letters of a word separately, all of them in their color. I can't speak for others, but I usually see the words in the color that is associated with their first letter, and sometimes they are tinged with a different color if another letter occurs several times in them. For example, the word synesthesia is yellow (possibly because the word for yellow starts with an S in my native language), and it has a hue of green because of th E's. It is a nice word color-wise. – Alensha ^talk 17:20, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Cassidy's page has a good visual example of the kind of phenomenon you describe (and which I also experience in my synesthesia). Perhaps something similar could be added to the article, as long as there is a good citation for the phenomenon being common among letter-color synesthetes. Blokhead (talk) 21:51, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Just a bit related

Has anyone here ever put male/female labels on numbers and letters (and also I suppose colors)? Or does anyone know what this is called?Brando26000 (talk) 18:39, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi Brando, see Ordinal linguistic personification. Also check out the main synesthesia page. Cheers, Edhubbard (talk) 13:01, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Artificial synesthesia?

Sounds like Syntax highlighting. --Doradus (talk) 18:12, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Arrows

Is the "→" arrow necessary when writing "Grapheme → color synesthesia"? No scholarly sources I've come across ever use an arrow, and I find it rather odd and distracting. If there are no objections I'll replace all the arrows with n-dashes to be in line with the title. HMman (talk) 02:21, 9 March 2013 (UTC).

Many scholarly sources use the arrow notation. It was first introduced in 2001 by Grossenbacher and Lovelace: See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11164734 (pdf here: http://www.daysyn.com/GrossenbacherLovelace2001.pdf)

See also http://website.education.wisc.edu/edneurolab/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Hubbard_CurrPsychRep07.pdf

See http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html

Many other sources use a simple dash. Indeed, I've used the dash myself in many publications (sometimes at the insistence of the typesetter):

http://website.education.wisc.edu/edneurolab/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Brang_Neuroimage10.pdf

http://website.education.wisc.edu/edneurolab/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Hubbard_JNeuropsych11.pdf

If you were to change it, you should go through all of wikipedia and make sure that you change it in every article in [[Category:synesthesia]]. One of the original rationales for using this notation on wikipedia is that we have a clear reference (the Grossenbacher and Lovelace) to say that it should be done this way. If you were to change the notation, you would also need to find a different reference to support the dash convention. If you do, make sure that you also change the reference on the main synesthesia page. If you change it just on this one article, then it would not be consistent across the category. Edhubbard (talk) 18:32, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

I see; thank you for the clarification. HMman (talk) 19:15, 9 March 2013 (UTC).

Does anyone know why this arrow is used? Is it supposed to denote a material implication, and if so, should it be wikilinked? Gautehuus (talk) 23:14, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

"To avoid ambiguities of phrases like ‘colored hearing’ we use notation of the general form (I)→(C) where ‘I’ and ‘C’ designate inducer and concurrent sets, respectively. Thus ‘(sound)→(color)’ efficiently refers to the form of synesthesia in which sound induces color." as per above mentioned "It was first introduced in 2001 by Grossenbacher and Lovelace: See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11164734 (pdf here: http://www.daysyn.com/GrossenbacherLovelace2001.pdf)",

So, "Grapheme → color synesthesia", refers to: that from the brain emerges a near simultaneous appreciation of a letter/number/symbol with a color. So the brain synesthises looking at a shape with a color; looking at a grapheme (= the smallest meaningful contrastive unit in a writing system), inducing a color perception. This is part of heuristics and can be useful, productive or not useful, even distracting and counter productive. Useful: helping to make decisions fast, that are pretty accurate in the vast majority of cases, for example your brain recognising what constitutes a potentially dangerous situation, dangerous people versus who are your allies. Cheers, SvenAERTS (talk) 09:48, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

Color words are irregular

I have synesthesia where all letters and numbers have colors, and words do too. A word's color for me usually depends on the first words, like someone in an above section mentioned. However, color words depend on the color the word describes, for example:

   R is purple, but Red is red.
   G is blue, but Green is green.
   B is orange, but Blue is blue.
   Etc.

Also, other words that describe colors, but aren't basic colors:

   E is white, but Emerald is emerald green.
   G is blue, but Gold is golden.
   N is red, but Navy is navy blue.
   Etc.

Other words too, just associated with colors:

   H is purplish pink, but Halloween is orange and black
   S is yellow, but Sea and Sky are blue and Snake is green.
   Etc.

There are more words, but my synesthesia seems to be like language almost. Most of the time it's regular, but there are irregular exceptions. 64.90.28.18 (talk) 17:13, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Does anyone have any followup? I've constantly been checking this page for about a year and a half now, hoping for a response, but as of yet no one seems to have noticed this. 64.90.28.18 (talk) 13:32, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Question for other people with this:

Am I the only one who just feels wrong when someone uses a different color for something than what you associate with it? For example people are saying that they associate blue with five and I immediately think no that's wrong it's pink what are you talking about. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.171.211.227 (talk) 02:36, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

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Ideasthesia and different scripts

this kind of relates to this uncited end section. "Ideasthesia: Evidence indicates that grapheme color synesthesia may be actually a case of ideasthesia. In other words, the vivid concurrent experiences of color may be induced by the concepts of graphemes and not by their sensory representations."

The following is obviously not verifiable enough to go in the article. But mentioning in case someone knows where to find citable research on the concept. I am a native speaker of English learning to read Arabic and Urdu, as i learn the foreign letters get brighter colours. The colours don't go by similar shape, and they don't even quite go by sound, they seem to go by related letters in transliterations.

• pink ق پ P Q
• yellow ن n
• green ک ك k
• light blue ف f

Though i just noticed an exception, hamza ء is yellow like 2 ... that might be a shape thing. But i think the Arabic chat alphabet might transliterate it as 2 and i think the Duolingo course i was doing used that transliteration. So that might not be a real exception.

I also just saw, there is one original colour, the superscript ــؕـ in the Urdu letters ٹ ڈ ڑ is red, but oddly the full sized letter ط doesn't have much colour, but i guess that makes sense since it has almost no relation to the superscript. Irtapil (talk) 18:14, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

I am a native English speaker with some ability in Arabic and Hebrew scripts, and I have this exact experience. As I learn the letters they get "coloured in" and start taking on the same colours as their transliterations in English. I also did a poll on social media of grapheme-colour synaesthetes who speak a language with a different script, and (impressively) got 4 responses, all saying the transliterations were the same colour as their L1 letters.

Kind of a shame Wikipedia doesn't allow original research ;)

2A02:C7F:BC70:F500:5524:BAE0:B8D0:D4C3 (talk) 02:13, 25 October 2020 (UTC)