Synaesthesia generally comes out of the blue - some people just have it while others don't. Those who do experience it typically report that they've always had it. But could it be learned?
Colizoli et al recruited 17 non-synaesthetes and got them to read books specially printed such that 4 common letters, "a", "e", "s" and "t", were always printed in a certain colour: red, orange, green or blue. The idea was that constant exposure to the coloured letters might trigger grapheme-color synaesthesia, which is a relatively common 'naturally occurring' form of the condition.
On average each volunteer read 100,000 words of the polychromatic prose. They also got a special browser plug-in to colour internet text in the same way, however, most people didn't use it.
What happened? The subjects experienced a colour-letter Stroop interference effect consistent with the idea that they'd learned particular colour-letter associations, although on another task there was no effect. But what was it actually like, subjectively? The size of the Stroop effect was correlated with self-reported synaesthetic experience on the question "I am experiencing color when thinking about certain letters".
However, the average answer to this question was only 2.5 on a scale from 1 to 5, which doesn't seem very high, and of course there was no control group, so this is hard to interpret. They don't seem to have quizzed people about the subjective experience in much detail, which is a bit of a shame. Six months later, participants could barely remember the letter-color pairs better than guessing.
So to be honest, it's all a bit inconclusive, but it's a cool idea.
Although you might expect the coloured text arrangement to be annoying, many participants said that they quite enjoyed it once they got used to it. Only 2 out of the 17 gave up before finishing a book, while several volunteered to read additional books. So if you want to try and give yourself synaesthesia, it could be doable.
Colizoli O, Murre JM, and Rouw R (2012). Pseudo-Synesthesia through Reading Books with Colored Letters. PloS one, 7 (6) PMID: 22761905
22 comments:
Perhaps this would be useful with numbers. It might make numbers easier to remember, and also make it easier to notice transpositions and other numeric "typos".
I myself am a synaesthete and I am not sure how it could be learned, at least the type that I have. It's very....organic, if that makes sense.
http://physicalismisdead.blogspot.com
I have a mild association of colors with numbers. I don't notice it while doing math, but I notice I 'like' some three digit numbers more than others because their associated colors go together (the way colors in plaids might go together).
My guess has been that the basis for the color association might be as simple as the wooden number blocks I played with as a child.
The history of color is fascinating. Not too long ago we didn't even have color TV or color print centuries ago. Letters used to be picturish and numbers didn't exist. Synaeseesia seems like an evolutionary thing. With the rapid flourishing of communication, information and constant stimulation is the brain evolving in a way that's adapting or coping with the rapid changes? Innate, Piaget, Chomsky and that stuff I don't care about comes to mind. Lots for language but I can't think of much for color. I helped a young boy, savant calculator learn to read by using different colored backgrounds. He wasn't able to spell 'cat', recall the alphabet or anything much prior but when I used a red background and scattered words on it associated with red, he was able to spell 40 words at a time in a few minutes. It was pretty extraordinary.
I noticed when I'm dehydrated and shove my head in the water I see cascades of blue rippling away in the darkness. Sort of feels hallucinogenic. I'm more prone to see strange colors swirling around my life not so much with numbers but with sounds, smells and stuff when I'm severely depressed or ovulating. I wonder why the 60s/70s was such a colorful time in history. Was it the mushrooms, hashish etc. or something evolutionary happened to the human species without us having the knowledge to figure it out yet.
I prefer LSD. That does the same but also gives you sound/taste synaesthesia with control on it's duration.
Works faster too then reading books.
Maybe it occurred because the brain usually read words, not letters separately. I don't know if I can call myself a synaesthete, once I don't actually see colored letters or numbers, but I do associate them to specific colors. Nevertheless, some complete and common words have their own colors...
I would like to use that browser plug-in. Does anybody know where I might obtain it?
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Sadly there's no link in the paper. They say that for the printed books, they downloaded them into Word from Project Gutenberg, then used a macro to colorize them. The macro's not provided either but it would be easy to code I think.
In a Word document, couldn't you just do a find and replace for each letter changing the color?
Katiesci
Some synaesthetes see color associated with musical sound. In music schools a fair amount of time is devoted to developing aural skills - identifying musical intervals and harmonies. This training does not usually result in significant improvement in musicianship because it involves slow cognitive processes connected with conscious recognition of musical sound rather than a rapid gestalt "feeling" association. So I wonder if people could be trained to associate color with harmonies (minor, major, augmented, diminished) without be cognitively aware of the association - ie when a major chord a unique color is "seen" without the individual being able to verbally identify the harmony as major.
That's interesting. If I had to draw primary chords I'd use primary colors, minor chords - secondary colors. I don't remember seeing colors wafting in the air when I played in orchestras but I do remember 'feeling' waves of sound swirling around. Like I could feel the chords touch my neck.. sort of like that prickly sensation you get when you think there's a ghost in the room or you left the kettle on the stove after leaving the house. I noticed when I feel s* I tend to avoid wearing colorful clothing. Even t-shirts with quirky words on them, just looking at them gives me the s*. I just want black, darkness, nothingness, murky hues. Certain colors scare me at times.
The author, Olympia Colizoli, has emailed me to say that anyone who wants to check out the materials used in the study should email her: o dot colizoli at uva dot nl.
I am one of the authors and have now put the bookmarklet online that allows you to color letters on a web page. Look at the top right of my page at murre.tk, where it says 'Color Letters'. You can also drag this link to your bookmark links bar and use it on any website.
i would like to know if this would be learnable if associated with certain colors to letters to creat a memory. So therefore if you cold match those colors to letters you would store that in long term memory.I feel if you try to memorize it you will start to sense those colors
I could not imagine making a jump from letters coloured systematically to synaesthesia. I might have more luck with meanings/semantics being coloured, but letter-colour seems too "mechanical" or purely Behaviourist. On the other hand I have music to colour synaesthesia but only when I listen to music played by others. When I play in an orchestra, I have no colour sensations at all which I think is due to narrowing my perceptual focus to just sound & black & white vision of notes on score [plus the conductor}. I think that certain brain-wave states associated with meditation or similar might be needed for my synaesthesia.
It just sounds like they grow to 'associate' the colors with letters. Maybe it is different for other types of synesthesia, but for me, I don't associate shapes with sound, I see them. They may not be as solid as real world solid objects, unless they are really loud, but I see them the same way I see translucent real objects.
Unpublished findings in Canada have demonstrated that experienced pettipoint pattern followers (who follow a numbered pattern where the numbers correspond to specific colours) have identical RT data to persons with synaesthesia. That report, however was rejected during peer review (there are differing accounts of why). I hope the publication of this Dutch report encourages Canadian resubmission!
That wouldn't create a pseudo-synesthesia it'd just be associating the letters with colour by memory, which would fade if exposure stopped.
I agree that it could for a bit acheive that same result though.
I did like this post and the idea behind it, but I think it might have been a little more conclusive using smell perhaps? I like the classical conditioning to used to make the readers associate the color to the letters, but maybe show just a letter on a screen, and throw out a perfume,then after the conditioning come back some months later and conduct an experiment to find out if certain smells would still trigger them to thing of certain letters.
I found this post interesting but not really surprising. We learned about memory and the three stages of memory (sensory, working, and long-term memory) in my psychology class so I wasn't surprised when they said they couldn't remember the letter-color pairs. Since they aren't synaesthetic, this doesn't come easily, so therefore, they have to remember the pairing. The problem is if they aren't paying attention to the color of the letters. Not paying attention would cause the pairing to be lost from sensory memory and forgotten. If they do pay attention, the pairing will be moved to working memory and can be remembered for a short time, if rehearsed, which is probably why they did learn the pairings initially. However, after the six months, they couldn't remember it at all because they did not encode the pairings into long-term memory. The conclusion of this post is that becoming synaesthetic is doable, which is true, as long as they find some way to encode the pairings into long-term memory.
No control group? The study is completely inconclusive.
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