Letters as Colors?

Posted June 11th, 2007 by Jen in education, family life, parenting

I just made an astonishing discovery. My seven year old son sees letters as colors. As we sat at the table finishing lunch just in this past hour, my daughter said, “Amy is a special name.” “Why is that,” I queried. “It starts with the letter A,” she replied, “which is the first letter of the alphabet.”

“And A is red.” This announcement from my son would have gone completely unnoticed by me, except for a very bizarre coincidence. Just about 20 minutes earlier, I had visited my cyber friend Dana, and clicked through to a link from commenter Julie. I glanced at a recent post by Julie, The Color of Thoughts, wherein is mentioned by commenter Bobbie that there exists a human gene that causes words to actually be a color.

We all know that kids say crazy things, and with the never ceasing chatter over here, I honestly would have paid no heed to, and likely would not have even consciously heard, my son’s color comment. So, sincere thanks, Dana, Julie, and Bobbie, for that string of discussion I trailed.

I began interrogating my son. What do you mean when you say the letter A is red? Are whole words colors? Are other objects associated with colors? Are numbers colors?

He informed me that he just sees the color in his mind, and that only letters have colors, not words. I began working through the alphabet with him. He sees A as red, B as yellow, C as blue, D as brown, E as yellow… Call me a cynic, but I wrote down the color associations he gave for each letter, and went back and quizzed him over and over to see if he came up with the same responses. You bet. A is red, B is yellow, C is blue.

We all should know what I did next. Google. There is a name for this phenomenon, and it’s called synesthesia - a neurological condition in which two or more senses are coupled. My son appears to have grapheme-color synesthesia, where an individual’s perception of numbers and letters are associated with the experience of colors. Guess what else wikipedia said? A is likely to be red. While no two synesthetes will report the same color associations, there are some commonalities.

Hey, my son is in good company. Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was among those with synesthesia. Wow, I’m just beginning to look into this (obviously!), so if anyone out there has some information or advice for me, I’d love to hear from you.

5 Responses

Julie June 11th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Isn’t the human brain extraordinary? My post today linke to a YouTube video about Daniel Tammet. I linked to part 2 because it is in part 2 of the video that he explains how he experiences numbers with colors and shapes.

You “test” reminds me of the two psychologist who tested Daniel in either part 4 or part 5. They gave him clay and had him mold his numbers one day. The next day, he was asked to do the same thing. Well, he used the same colors and molded almost identical shapes… it was very interesting!
Jane June 11th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
That is very interesting! I hadn’t heard of that before. Isn’t that cool that you were made aware of it just befor your son’s comment!
Jen June 12th, 2007 at 7:45 am
Julie, thanks, I watched the video you linked to. Incredibly interesting to me. Our brains are so amazingly complex, such a testimony to our Creator God who is infinitely creative and wise. :-) Give me the latest details if you find out more about this. This is just one more aspect of my son that helps me understand him better, and as his primary teacher, these sort of idiosyncrasies (?) reveal things about how he learns and connects with the world.

Jane, rather than saying this discovery was due to a very bizarre coincidence, I should have said due to the providence of God. I’d never heard of synesthesia before either, and I would have thought this was merely an odd isolated incident, since my son is already quite quirky! It’s nice to know there’s information out there about this.
Erik June 13th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
I wonder if early learning instills those colors or if it is something else? By early learning I mean that often the blocks or games we give children have a red apple for A, a yellow banana for B.

I am not sure why C would be blue, but perhaps the red apple explains the commonality of the red A? Perhaps other cultures experience a different association?
Jen June 14th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Erik, that was my first thought, actually. I wondered if he was associating colors from the letter refrigerator magnets. Studies have been done on this very idea, and the bottom line was “there are few if any reported cases involving culture-based, learned sets” of synesthesia… I did read that it runs strongly in families.

I just received a really interesting phone call from one of my sisters. She read this post and called me, a bit unnerved. She said she has this “number thing” that she’s never told anyone about - she just though she was totally weird her whole life. It’s not a color association, but more of a spatial-pattern thing she has with numbers, and also time. When she described it to me, it was a lot like Daniel Tammet’s experience with numbers - that’s the video of the guy with synesthesia linked to on Julie’s site, where I first read about this several days ago.

I told her to hush before she gets turned into a science experiment. :-) But really, this is all quite fascinating.

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Letters as Colors?

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