Does anyone here have this condition, or ability, or whatever you like to call it?
For those who don’t know, it refers to sensory inputs stimulating other senses than the one to which the stimulation would normally be directed. Typically it seems to take the form of people “seeing” colours in response to certain sounds, smells, or perhaps references to concepts such as numbers, letters or days of the week. Maybe that starts with being exposed as a very young child to alphabet blocks where the ‘A’ was orange, the ‘B’ was blue, etc. I tend to associate Sunday with yellow, Monday with light blue, Tuesdays and Thursdays with a sort of greyish brown or orange, and Wednesday with a deep forest green. I cannot explain any of these associations.
The “seeing sounds as colours” thing seems to be quite common. People might “see” middle C as a particular colour, or associate certain colours with certain musical keys. They may claim that transposing a piece of music into a different key completely changes the colour of it, and they don’t mean “colour” as a figure of speech, they mean its literal colour. I don’t have this ability but I have always kind of envied those who do, because they seem to report that it does not spoil their appreciation of music at all but rather enhances it. The most I can claim is that something in a minor key seems “dark”, both figuratively and literally, compareed with something in a “bright” major key.
