You hear a voice in your head when you're reading, right?

Re:You hear a voice in your head when you're reading, right? by gh02t on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @07:20PM (#11163514)

Sounds like synesthesia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia ). People with synesthesia tend to associate colors with numbers or similar. Often it's extremely specific colors, like "deep electric purple with sparkles" for 125. These colors can be consistently identified and described across multiple tests, suggesting that the person actually maintains a consistent inner representation of numbers in terms of color.

Associating colors with days of the week is another well known example, described in the book "Wednesday is Indigo Blue" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_Is_Indigo_Blue ). You might find it interesting.

I only know about this because I had a friend in middle school who was a synesthete. We thought he was making it up until we gave him a list of (long) random numbers to describe the colors of. We then mixed up the order and gave them to him a week later and he provided consistent descriptions. It was pretty cool actually, I've always been a bit envious.

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Re:You hear a voice in your head when you're reading, right? by frikk on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @04:30PM (#11170386)

Yeah, that's fascinating. I didn't realize there was a name, or even that the colors and days of the week is a thing that other people experience. How weird is it that my Wednesday is blue too?

Thanks for sharing, I've got some reading to do.

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