6:10am April 5, 2015

You want conceptual synesthesia to make sense?. Go somewhere else.

Back when I was in my late teens, I tried to describe some of my conceptual synesthesia (a.k.a ideasthesia) to people I knew. At the time, most of the people I could discuss this with happened to be math or physics geeks, all quite brilliant. And by brilliant I mean, my best friend at the time discovered a new property of the Fibonacci sequence while still in high school. I had met her in a gifted program where I didn’t fit in, and she spent the next several years pursuing a friendship before I realized she wanted to know me for who I was, not the living plaything my other “friends"wanted me to be.

You got into the program by taking the SAT in junior high to see if you qualified. Me and her were both unusual as AFAB people who had higher math than verbal scores. But her scores were so high that unbeknownst to me, she also went to a second program I’d never heard of (for the ultra-gifted?) and was studied and tracked all throughout school after that.

Anyway, so by my late teens the only people I could talk to about my ideasthesia are math and physics geeks. They were especially interested in how my brain saw time.

It’s like a helix, a corkscrew shape, that I’m at the center of. Each wind around is a year. The years are colored by decade color (1980s were green for 8, which overshadowed the other colors). Months have their own shapes and colors, and so do days of the week. I can zoom in and out to get those different units if time and I can spin the helix so that other times are facing me. Certain events and memories are embedded in the helix at certain spots. Others are not. Some of the spots are larger or fluffier than others ("i know it took place between 1982 and 1985” is different than being able to pinpoint the month, week, day or hour.). Some memories sent on the helix at all.

This is where the geeks would lose interest. “But that’s not how time works.” Never said it did. Reminds me of the music teacher who tried to figure out which note in a chord I picked up first with my perfect pitch. He eventually got fed up and said “What use is it if you’re not even picking up the root of the chord or something else useful?”

Seems some people get peeved when your synesthesia or perfect pitch doesn’t meet their standards of realistic or useful. I wasn’t aware the human brain was wired to always be realistic or useful. Oh well. I happen to like my time helix (despite my awful sense of time, long term memory seems to handle it better) and if it’s not useful to you, you’re not even the one who can see it so what do you care?. And yet the responses I got ranged from disappointment to hostility.

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