Thursday, October 30, 2008

The colour of my life at the moment...

... is red.

I've been trying hard to find a particular yarn for a custom order. One of my return customers wants four knitted hedgehogs made in "Santa" colours - a bright scarlet red with white.

Now I have probably 6 or 7 hedgehog-friendly yarns in red, but all bar one tend towards crimson and more purple kinds of red. Typical. Actually it's probably that way because I prefer purple to orange, so I've picked out reds that reflect that.

I'm also making red beads at the moment, because I've sensed an opportunity to sell jewellery to the girls in Ladies' Choir. We wear black in concerts, and try to wear red jewellery. Several people have mentioned that they don't have anything red - so that's where I come in! I have three necklaces ready so far, hopefully should get a load more done over the next few days.

Bear with me - this seems irrelevant but it's not. Sometimes I look up something on Wikipedia, and while I'm reading the article I'll open up links that interest me in other tabs. When I finish the article I close the tab, and move onto the next tab, and do the same thing. It's kind of like surfing, except I end up in loads of different places at once. Often I just mean to look up a couple of subjects, and end up spending hours reading page after page - I call it "falling into a Wiki Hole" (see also Wookey Hole - nothing to do with Star Wars - and K-hole).

I fell into one when looking up the word red, just to check out if there were other good words I could use.

Somehow that lead me to the page on virginity, but that's not what I wanted to talk about.

While on the synesthesia page, I made a not-really-very-surprising discovery. I have a form of synesthesia. I'm not going to explain what synesthesia is, follow the link!

I have number form synesthesia, specifically for days of the week and months of the year - each day or month has a position on a circle for me.

Days follow this pattern: the week forms an oval shape, wider than it is tall. Wednesday is exactly at the bottom of the oval, Saturday and Sunday at the top. The days run anti-clockwise so Monday is on the left and Friday on the right, and the weekdays are closer to each other than they are to the weekend.

Strangely, the months run clockwise, unlike the days. The year is a circle, not an oval, but the months are unevenly spaced. December is at 9 o'clock, April at 12 o'clock. July is 3 o'clock and 6 o'clock sits just between October and November. And for some reason, I can't help by think of December as the start of the cycle (it's in the same position as Monday).

Maybe I'll draw my day/month forms so you can see more clearly what I mean.

If I know that Tuesday is the 13th for example, and want to count forwards so many days, I see the oval in my head as I count, and the numbers fit into the form in the right positions for the days. if that makes any sense.

I discussed this with my mum fairly recently, and was surprised to find out that she has the same thing, except her days and months both run clockwise and Monday and January are at the top. Whick is kind of logical, because she's reflecting the clock face.

Anyone else experience this? Or something similar?

3 comments:

  1. I don't see that (I'm not terribly visual), but I understand the concept perfectly. It rather describes the way I think - "around corners" according to my mom.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That is really interesting, if totally outside my envelope. I don't experience anything like that, though I've heard of several different flavours of synesthesia.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I don't think I'm particularly visual either Sayre. But I find when learning new information it helps me a lot to work in colours, with each subject having a different colour. Cognitive psychology will always be red or blue to me, and social psychology is yellow. Strangely, it has to be the text that is coloured or it doesn't work - I've tried coloured paper and that doesn't help.

    I often think about how I think. It's called metacognition. I don't tend to think in words - I do have an internal voice but only when I'm writing, rehearsing conversations or otherwise actually using words - usually I think in concepts which are more complicated perhaps than words. It's hard to describe. but very interesting.

    Rob, some experts think that we all have synesthesia as babies, but the neural pathways which cause the senses to "cross over" are pruned away very early. I imagine some of the other types can make life a little confusing! It's a fscinating subject.

    ReplyDelete