Posted by iansteyn 11/2/2025
syn_1: black
syn_2: purple
syn_3: red
syn_4: gold
syn_5: blue
syn_6: silver
syn_7: yellow
syn_8: brown
syn_11: teal
syn_16: orange
Here's a few relevant things we know:
- Synesthesia is not rare. You probably know someone that has synesthesia, even they haven't mentioned it.
- There are many forms of synesthesia. Many documented forms that we know of, and very probably a bunch we haven't documented yet.
- There are cases of tasks where we are able to measure enhanced performance of that task by synesthetes. (2)
- While some synesthetes do have a single form of synesthesia, it is common for synesthetes to experience multiple forms. We've found cluster groups where subjects with a given form are more likely to have another form within the same cluster.
From the other writings on the OP's site, we can see that they report to have at least two forms of Colored Sequence Synesthesia: Grapheme -> Color, and Day of the Week -> Color.
Their report of their experience in the linked article sounds like possibly Shape -> Motion. This is a form they could have, and it's plausible that someone already known to be a multiple synesthete might also experience this.
It is also plausible that someone with a Shape -> X type of synesthesia would be able use that to spot the odd shape out faster than others.
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(1) I maintained the online synesthesia battery for a number of years while working in the Eagleman Neuroscience Lab at Baylor College of Medicine
(2) Some of these are ones that allowed us to study synesthesia on a larger scale by testing online! Among those, one particularly notable form of test is Stroop Interference. Genuine synesthetes are able to respond much faster and more accurately, and we get a good clear separation between them and controls.
Back when I was handling it, we were still using Flash for most of the interactive tests, because that was how you had to do it when it was first built circa 2007. Obviously those would have had to be redone in HTML5 since then to keep it working on modern browsers.
So what happens when synesthetes watch a movie that is showing blue colors, but the score that they are hearing at that time is making them see red. Do they perceive that as a dissonance?
This makes me wonder if there’s a way to set data visualisation to make the most of this for those gifted people.
I’m in a minority thinking that perhaps the limiting RGB colour gamut should be made into 4 colours to accommodate those people who can see four colours, tetrachromacy, ~95% of us have a visual impairment.
Is American clover an invader, or a similar species from before tectonic plates drew out the Ocean?
Edit: Solved.