I have Synesthesia. It is an interesting phenomenon where the brain blends or misinterprets sensory input, resulting in various types of ‘cross-circuitry’.

This word comes from two Greek words: Syn and Aisthesis. “Syn” meaning “together” and “Aithesis” meaning “perception”. Therefore Synesthesia is our perceptions or senses interplaying together.

There are limitless forms of Synesthesia but 80 confirmed forms; from Grapheme-Color one of the most common, to Lexical-Gustatory which is a rare form of Synesthesia.

These forms of Synesthesia come from a mixture of two senses working together at one time. In the case of Lexical -Gustatory Synesthesia, which is sound and taste, someone might hear the word basketball and taste waffles. However, some forms like Grapheme-Color are a combination of the same sensory but in two different forms. For example you might see the letter A as the color green or the word Wednesday as the color yellow which is two visual sensory items being combined; Text + Color. Grapheme-Color specifically gives a color to every letter, number, day of the week, and month. With every form of Synesthesia though, no two people have it exactly alike.

The many other forms of Synesthesia are combinations of sound and color, color and feel (i.e. where a pain may feel “pink”), and even spatial with visual (where our concepts of depth which is visual is combined with text). This spatial and visual Synesthesia is called Spatial Sequence Synesthesia, people with this form of Synesthesia see months, weeks, hours of days, or other forms of text such as the alphabet and numbers in space around them.

Now if every number has a color we can visualize the colors while studying the number sequence making our chances of remembering the order, let alone the numbers given regardless of order, stronger.

Synesthetes do not necessarily have a stronger advantage when it comes to certain areas of memory. Synesthetes do however, have better Episodic memory and recall due to the dual-encoding leading to multiple means of retrieval.

When I was younger, the manifestation was stronger than now. I suppose I’ve been conditioned to a more consensual reality, or maybe I’m simply out of practice. Through my 20s, 30s and 40s, I worked in the computer industry as a technical engineering representative and a technical support advisor to other technicians. I was responsible for knowing everything there was to know about several different computer system product lines. In this role, I dealt with hundreds, maybe thousands of parts. Each one had a seven digit part number, plus a suffix. Whenever a field engineer from our region was struggling to find a part number for a part that may have failed and had to be ordered, they would call me because I had most of the numbers memorized. I didn’t know how I did it, other than the fact that each number digit had a color in my head. The color representation of each digit has never altered. An eight is always yellow. For awhile, into my 40s, I could still remember every single phone number I had ever dialed. Of course there were fewer phones back then. But I still remember several phone numbers from my youth for some reason, even though I have not dialed them for thirty or forty years. When I see them in my head, they are still all in color.

Another way that it manifests for me is that I viscerally feel music. The highs are most poignant in my head, fingertips and my toes and the more structural rhythm bass lines I feel within my core.

Why am I sharing this with you? It serves very well to illustrate an important point about how each of us interprets and engages with the world around us. This experience has been a constant reminder for me in my life of two things: 1) that we do not all see the world the same way, and 2) that the consensual perceived reality that we all take for granted is NOT ‘reality’, it is simply a convenient convention that we all agree to. We give each of us the permission to ignore what doesn’t seem to fit into our accepted framework, and over time, we have come to marginalize discussion and behaviors that threaten this world-view. For me, this has been a tremendous gift, because it has permitted me to understand 1) and 2) above, and also to explore the edges of our reality with more of an open mind. It’s a bit like the difference between walking around in the world with only one eye open, and getting accustomed to seeing things a certain consistent way, and then you suddenly gain sight in your other eye and you can for the first time see things in stereoscopic vision. Things in your field of view suddenly have ‘depth’ and imbue a different meaning to their intrinsic spatial nature. It adds a dimension to your perception of the world around you.

In another essay that I have been developing for many years, I explore the contribution that this has had on my own reality model.