Color Me Impressed

Synesthsia is a condition in which a person's senses don't operate the way that they do for the majority of people. Music may affect their sense of smell, for example, or looking at a painting may produce feelings of taste. It can be tough for people to handle until they become more comfortable with their differences and perhaps establish workarounds in order to have sensible conversations with other people about what goes on in a regular day.

Bernadette Sheridan, an artist, sees letters and numbers as colors. This is called grapheme-color synesthsia, and she says it usually happens with names. Although she hears the sounds of the names, her brain is working to translate those sounds into letters and then into colors. In this article at Medium, she shows how this process can leave her not remembering a name so much as a sequence of colors, something like the old signal flags that ships used for communication before radio. If the name has a pretty common grouping of letters, she might mistake it for a similar name with many of the same colors. And once she knows how to spell a name, she says she associates it with color blocks for all of the letters, even ones that are silent or are sound differently depending on their surrounding letters.

Sheridan created a website called synesthesia.me in order to try to illustrate how she sees the letters and colors connect. And for the specific tendency she has to assign them for names, she added a section that lets a user type in a name and see the colors that Sheridan assigns to the letters. She points out that even someone else with grapheme-color synesthesia might not see the same colors, so it's not a universal guide.

And being an American in the 21st century, Sheridan found a way to make a little bank off her different view. You can buy prints of one, two or three names from her at Etsy.