My Daughter’s Synesthesia: “S” Is Always Red, and “T” Is Lime Green

According to a color-picking test at synesthete.org, these are the colors my daughter perceives when she sees or thinks about letters and numbers.

As you can see, each time the test flashed a random letter or number, she didn’t always adjust the sliders to find the exact same colors. For one item (I forget which) she kept saying something like, “Where is blue-purple-green?” and she said the shade of gray she ended up picking for the number 0 was not “sparkly” enough. Also, at one point she confused the letter “O” with the numeral “0.” According to the test, my daughter’s grapheme->color association is not very strong. Still, it’s fascinating to get this glimpse into her world.

What is Synesthesia?

Synesthesia is a perceptual condition of mixed sensations: a stimulus in one sensory modality (e.g., hearing) involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another modality (e.g. vision). Likewise, perception of a form (e.g., a letter) may induce an unusual perception in the same modality (e.g. a color). Click here for more information on synesthesia.

What is the Synesthesia Battery?

This battery of tests provides a standard battery of questions, tests and scoring. This test is available to the whole community of researchers and synesthetes for their use in making scientific progress. Your data will be kept entirely private, for use only by yourself, and by a researcher if you provide a valid email address for one.

via The Synesthesia Battery.