I used to believe things. Not that there was a Santa Claus able to travel faster than light, a fairy that ate teeth and shat coins or that there is a life after death (there’s a reason why it’s called DEATH, don’t you think?). No. Until a couple of years ago I believed, or more like took it for granted, that everybody sees numbers in their mind as coloured numerals. What? You don’t? Let me try to explain how this looks to me.
Every number from 0 to 9 has it’s own colour or shade of gray. I’ve illustrated roughly what they look like below:
Now as you see, it’s a bit complicated with the shades of gray. Hey! I didn’t invent this – it was just sort of always there. To make matters worse, when numbers stand together to form yet another number, as they often do – the clever bastards, the colours at the end of the number seems to outshine the others. I’ve tried to illustrate this with some of my favorite years:
I only see this in my mind when thinking about numbers, not when reading numbers, mind (no pun intended) you. I have more strange things going on in my mind, but I’ll keep that for future posts.
I’ve later learned that some incredibly intelligent and fascinating autistic people see numbers as coloured three dimentional shapes. Pretty cool! There’s some very interesting research to be done in this field.
Do you see colours? Do you have some interesting visualisations in your mind? Am I crazy? I’m looking forward to be reading your stories!
[tags]weird, mind, visualization, colours, vision, numbers, autism[/tags]
I don’t see colors, but to me numbers definitely have a blend of “texture” and personality. There’s definitely a emotional tie-in for me with numbers.
I experience the same sortof effect with groups of numbers too, in the sense that certain strings of digits have complex associated tones to them. For example, “74″ is “jagged/sharp/difficult-but-steadfast”… “303″ is a flirtacious, round number. Etc.
Interesting! There are numbers that I feel more comfortable with, like 1984 for instance. It’s hard to describe how it feels. There’s like this vast dark void, and in the center there’s the number shining and lighting up in glorious Technicolors.
I had a look at your http://m.iscellaneo.us/ site. Love the collected weirdness! (I see you also have the pinata guy there that I twatted about earlier :)
Another interesting thing about numbers is whether you view a time line from the past to the future as going left to right or right to left.
I see the past on my right and the future on my left:
2010..2009..2008..2007..2006..2005….1973..1972..1971 etc.
I wonder whether there is a connection between the above and being right or left handed?
That is very interesting indeed! I’m right handed and I see the years as a time line going from past on the left to future on the right with some years as coloured ‘milestones’. Are you left handed?
The visualised time line in my mind also scales or zooms in to focus on the year I’m thinking of and the crazy thing is that the level of magnification is also depending on the subject matter relevant to the year, that is to say with one focus I might see a timespan of several thousand years and not so many coloured milestone year and with another focus I might only see a time frame spanning say 20 years with a lot of years as coloured milestones. I think it correlates to my knowledge of history and my personal life. The time line seems to change when I add detailed knowledge.
Visually, the time line starts at the left hand bottom corner of my mind and is sort of coming towards me with the present somewhere near the top right hand corner. The mostly white numbers come at me from a dark void, growing in size – sort of like traveling along the Z axis towards me. The numbers only have colours if I have a specific focus in mind.