People & Colours

This particular post could make me sound like a complete nutjob but I'm going to go ahead and write it anyway.

Ever since I was a child I've had this thing where I associate different people with different colours. I don't mean that I think of a person and then think of their favourite colour. I mean that when I think of someone I know I get a particular colour flash into my mind. My Mum always found this fascinating and whenever I met someone new she'd ask me what colour I related them to.

I was finding it hard to get to sleep the other night and when that happens I think about beads and possible designs for them. I tried doing that for half an hour but I was still wide awake so I put my iPod on and had yet another listen to the most recent Ricky Gervais audiobook and there's a little bit in there about Karl Pilkington's theories on how his brain works. After that I started thinking about how I think about things. It's very difficult to explain but I noticed that when I think about a particular person the first thing I 'see', for the tiniest fraction of a second, is their name written in a certain colour. For example, when I think of Chris I see his name written in a shade of sky blue. I then tried thinking about lots of different people and seeing what colour their names were. I must have worn my brain out because I did eventually drift off to sleep!

(I've just read this back to myself and I do indeed sound a little bit mad but I'm going to carry on regardless ..... )

When I woke up I was still intrigued about the colour thing so I decided to send texts to various friends and family and I asked them 'If you were a colour, what colour would you be?'.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that most people's answers matched the color that I associate them with in my (slightly crazy) mind. There were a couple that threw me. My youngest sister Emily said she would be red whereas I've always 'seen' her as turquoise. And my niece Robyn totally shocked me when she said that she would be silver. I love the randomness of that child! She is a bright bubblegum pink in my mind.

Emily rang me up to find out what the heck I was asking such an odd question for and when I told her she said that she does the whole people-and-colour-association thing too! And even stranger than that, we associate the same people with the same colours. For example, we both associate Mum with a bright golden yellow, our sister Sally with green and Robyn with bubblegum pink.

Thoroughly intrigued by this I did a spot of internet research last night and I discovered that I may well have an actual proper thing that exists. It's called Chromatic-Lexical Synesthesia. It's mainly the names of personally familiar people that I get this with but occasionally other words will trigger a colour response. I also see various letters and numbers as having colours. Not all, but some. Apparently, research shows that there is a link between synesthesia and creativity. I was also really interested to read that a lot of synesthetes have trouble with sense of direction and difficulties with numbers and mathematics. Well, I have zero sense of direction and I was useless at maths at school. I'm also terrible at remembering dates and phone numbers.

So there you go. Nutjob or synesthete? I'll take the latter, thanks - it sounds better!