I do this! simple things like days of the week, months, numbers, names etc all have colours and i visualise songs as shapes sometimes too. might look into it.
Synaesthesia is one of those neurological conditions which absolutely amazes me. It's something I'm particularly interested in researching once I have finally finished my neuroscience degree, though it may take a back seat from my research in neurological 'disorders'... I use that term loosely as essentially synaesthesia is a disorder, yet more often than not people can associate it as being beneficial... that is to say it's often found that the condition brings a greater sense of knowledge, the fact that one can merely associate words with colour and in fact passages, they not only have the words themselves remember, but also (in grapheme synaesthesia) colours so it could help somewhat but the problem facing many synaesthetes is that whilst their condition is predominantly beneficial, by offering great memory, musical abilities (in the form of those with perfect pitch) and also art, the majority exhibit mathematical deficiencies (such as lexical->digit, right/left confusion and poor sense of direction) and a small minority, though not insignificantly, also suffer from dyscalculia, with a large proportion also suffering from dyslexia, autism and attention deficit disorder.
A complicating factor is that a subject will grow up assuming that everyone else experiences what they experience as they have nothing else to compare to. Many have the condition from birth and it is therefore a ‘normal’ characteristic to hold. Only when they’re older do they discover that this fascinating condition is in fact something which only a small proportion of the population hold because as children mentioning what they have usually leads to suppression due to the child ‘attention seeking’.
I've done an awful lot of research into this condition and have plenty of books/journals on it, so if you're ever bored and fancy a chat, give us a shout!
RE: books, I'd suggest a read of these:
- Cytowic, R.E., 2002. Synaesthesia. 2nd ed. New York: MIT Press
- Dann, K.T., 1998. Bright colours falsely seen. New Haven: Yale University Press
and if you want any journals (if you're not a student/research associate and may not have access to nature or any of the other big sites) I'll happily email you plenty
Cytowic is pretty well known for his research into synaesthesia and has conducted some of the largest investigations to date. Interestingly, he's also involved in studies regarding autism spectrum disorder, which in itself is just as fascinating.
