Following on from Monday's blog, I've just completed another online synaesthesia test. 'Do you see what I see?', also by Sagiv and Ward at UCL, will take you about 10 minutes to complete and gives you slightly more feedback on your responses than the music-and-colour test.
In the first part of the test, you are presented with a succession of numbers, letters and days of the week (all black on white) and are invited to select the most appropriate colour for each of them from a colour chart. I found that, for certain numbers, letters or days, I had no hesitation in selecting a colour. 'Tuesday' for me, has always been red, like the number four. I wonder why? My (non-expert) opinion is that my personal synaesthetic connections were formed in childhood, by the accidental choice of colours in my first reading and counting books. (Or perhaps the illustrators of my childhood books were, themselves, synaesthetics, and their choice of colours was dictated by their own synaesthetic preferences?)
The feedback on my responses was disappointingly incomplete. Rather than receiving enlightening comment on the fact that my 2s, As and Sundays were ALWAYS yellow, I was merely told that I'd selected murky green for nine of my twenty-three tests. Lots of things are murky-green to me, especially things I'm indifferent about.
In the second part of the test, I was given just a second to spot the geometrical shape made by several 2s in a sea of 5s. I thought I'd failed utterly as I clicked in turn on the various options, 'triangle', 'square' etc, and was then told I'd correctly identified all the shapes. The purpose of this test, apparently, is to investigate synaesthetic connections between numbers and spatial arrangement. I'm afraid this one passed me by completely, but then I've always had an aversion to numbers, in whatever form (which is, perhaps, worthy of study in itself :)
A further numbers test invited me to 'place' a given number on a clock-face surrounding another given number, e.g. to place 8 at some point on a circle around the number 19. I'm afraid the clock-face parallel was too great for me and, ignoring the central number, I simply placed numbers where they'd appear on a clock-face.
A final, brief test invited me to apply nonsense-words to nonsense-shapes. There were only two shapes, an amoeba and a jagged shape, and my descriptive options were something like "bloogle" and "kikkii." No hesitation there, then. Sagiv and Ward then pointed out that this sort of onomatapoeic connection 'may' lie at the root of all language. I'd like to find out more about this, and if I find anything interesting, I'll share it with you. Meanwhile, try some of the other tests on the BBC Psychology website.
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