I very recently discovered that I have an affliction called grapheme-color synesthesia, however I’m not sure I would consider it an affliction since the word "affliction" has negative connotations and I don’t see it as negative. Grapheme means “letter or number”. The synesthesia is the unconscious act of associating two things that most of us would typically see as completely independent of each other - for example tasting letters or seeing sounds.

Most people don’t make the connections I make - that being associating colors with a numbers. For most everyone, a three is a 3. Nothing more, nothing less. However, that’s not true for me… a three is yellow (duh). I can't remember a time when I did not see numbers as colors and it wasn’t until the past few years that I actually realized that nobody else I knew saw it that way.

I wonder how it could have taken me so long to realize that I was making a connection that didn’t logically exist – and thus, why should it be true for anyone – including me? Nevertheless, at some point, the light bulb clicked on and I decided I wanted to see who else might have grapheme-color synesthesia. The only problem was that I didn’t know there was a name for it.

Recently, I sent out an email on the Triple Nine Society message board inquiring about this and one person sent back a response that introduced me to the scientific name for it. Once I had that, I read quite a bit about it – all very fascinating.

It seems that people with synesthesia are pretty much born that way and it is also true that they don’t change much over time. In other words, if I see the number nine as brown, I’m going to see it as brown ten years later. If I see the letter Z as black, that’s not going to change either.

Many people with synesthesia will use the relationship between colors and numbers or colors and letters to help them remember names or strings of digits. Apparently, this phenomenon has been known about for quite awhile, so research is becoming more advanced.

I don’t know that it is an indicator of anything about the person – whether related to intelligence or memory, but they have determined the parts of the brain that are responsible for it. Grapheme-color synesthetes tend to have an increased thickness, volume, and surface area of the fusiform gyrus. And, that’s about as technical as I care to get with it.

I asked a dozen friends to associate the ten digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 with nine colors (alphabetical): Black, Blue, Brown, Green, Orange, Purple, Red, White, Yellow – leaving one digit blank.

To my utter surprise, not only did they not agree at all, but there was hardly any consensus about any pair. They didn’t even agree with me. Their results were pure random guesses from what I could see. I found myself looking at their pairs and saying to myself… “wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, right, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong” – as though I were grading a test with absolute correct or incorrect answers.

The only explanation for why I would tend to view their responses in such an absolute way is because I see the associations between the numbers and colors as clearly as I see almost anything else. There is very little subjectivity to it from my perspective.

Here are my associations for the nine colors and ten digits. Also shown is my confidence level for each. Most are crystal clear, but not all.

As you can see seven of the nine numbers are 100% associated with a color. The problem comes with Blue and Purple. Blue could be either four or eight – though I’m more comfortable with it being four. Purple could be either two or eight. Both seem about equal to me.

If I had thought about it, I would have added a 10th color (gray) which would have been a no-brainer at #2 - especially with 0 (black) and 1 (white) and which would then force purple to be #8 and blue #4. Even though the #2 as gray is extremely logical, it doesn't jump out at me for some reason. Maybe too much gray matter or too little gray matter. That, of course, is an attempt at a joke!

Looking only at those seven colors that I am 100% confident of, here are the total number of people who agreed with me out of the 12 that I “tested”.

As I said, that’s really no more than random agreement. My sister agreed with me on three of them – more than anyone else, but that's probably just coincidence.

The really strange thing about this to me is that, although I can accept (begrudgingly) a person not agreeing on Yellow, Red, Green, Orange or Brown, I’m flabbergasted that anyone would not have 0 as Black and 1 as White. I would think that would almost be learned. Computer code is simply 0’s and 1’s. What two colors go together in a pair more than black and white? And, what two numbers go together in a pair more than zero and one? It just seems obvious. But, none of the other 12 that I “tested” had both a zero as black and a one as white.

Considering none of the people I quarried seem to have grapheme-color synesthesia, I simply chalked up their "wrongness" to that fact. However, in researching this, it’s apparently true the associations made between numbers and colors are almost random among those with the affliction. In other words, few people are going to agree with each other even if they are completely confident of what the associations should be based upon seeing them in their mind.

As to alphabetical associations with color, that isn’t something I can identify with at all. That just seems wierd and I want to say "Those people are just wierdos.", but ... Although I write prodigiously, I’m overwhelmingly more of a numbers guy. It would probably be an interesting mini-study to determine if those with only number/color convictions are “numbers” people while those with only alphabet/color convictions are “words” people.

In any event, I don’t think the fact that I see numbers as colors has either enhanced or discouraged my ability to deal with numbers. I mostly just see it as an interesting subject.