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I am not a synaesthete and I wonder how other non-synaesthetes perceived the '5 vs 2' diagram. Even though I see all the digits in plain black, the triangle of 2s immediately stood out to me. The author writes: 'For me, four-leaf clovers are a different shape so they stand out in a clover patch very much like this. Unlike letters and numbers, however, I don't get a sense of color, it's more like a sense of movement.' But even as a non-synesthete, I felt a sense of movement in the 2s, as if they were little swans swimming against the bevy of 5s. But I felt no such movement when looking at the photographs of clovers. I could only spot a few four-leaf clovers at a quick glance because the pale markings on them form a rough quadrilateral, so I was essentially spotting those shapes rather than the four leaflets themselves. If this sort of topic interests you, I wrote an article earlier this year about number–colour–phoneme associations: https://susam.net/assoc.html As I mentioned, I do not have synaesthesia, yet the associations between numbers, colours and phonemes are quite strong in my mind due to early exposure to CGA colours and mnemonic systems. For instance, I find it hard to think of the number 1 without thinking of blue or the phonemes /t/ and /d/, or to think of 4 without thinking of red or /r/. I have written more about it in the article linked above. |
This very specific topic about clovers is one that I relate to, I've always found 4 leaf clovers faster. But I wouldnt say I have synesthesia.
This has developed/manifested itself into looking for things on a computer screen, which I essentially do for a living. I can hold a piece of text in my head and scroll by quickly to search for it much faster than many of my peers.
And as a child colors would also have numbers related to them in my mind, and vice versa. Which I attributed to number-coded coloring books.