Fisher Price Color Associations

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Synesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. Like, for example, somebody might hear a trumpet and always see the color scarlet when they see it. You’ve heard about this.

Yes, -huh, yeah.

There are not that many people who have synesthesia, maybe 3% of the population. But there’s also a subgroup of that called grapheme synesthesia. And this is where people associate written symbols like letters or numbers with a particular color. And there’s been some interesting research on this recently by researchers at NYU and Baylor College of Medicine.

They surveyed more than 6,500 synesthetes, people with that condition, and they found that a striking number of them associate at least 10 letters of the alphabet with the very same colors.

Oh, that’s interesting.

How weird is that?

Why do they do that?

I’m glad you asked.

Because the colors begin with a letter?

No.

No.

Good guess. But they found, I’ll give you another clue, they found that all of the people in that group happened to be born in 1967 or later. And what they finally figured out, their hypothesis is…

Oh, Sesame Street.

Close.

Their hypothesis has to do with the fact that in 1971, Fisher-Price started producing its magnetic alphabet letters, you know, that you put on the fridge and the kids rearrange them. And they found that one participant actually associated 25 letters of the alphabet to the very same colors in that set.

Wow.

Yeah.

So it doesn’t mean that that caused their synesthesia, but it may suggest that in some cases that people who have that condition are more influenced by their environment than you might think.

And the reason I wanted to talk with you about it is because I was thinking about whether there were anything like that in my past that I associated, like a word that I saw when I was little in a book or something. The one thing I can think of is the numeral five. I think five has always felt like my number, and I think it’s because that was the age where I really started getting a sense of myself. I felt like five was my number. Started school and got more responsibility maybe.

Yeah, and I was differentiating myself from other people, and so five is just far and away my favorite number.

Do you have anything like that, a word or a letter?

I don’t have any kind of association, but this conforms to what we know in the dictionary business, which is there’s a lot of baggage attached to language that is never recorded in print. One of the examples I use when I do public speaking is all the different terms we have for the derriere. We understand as native speakers that one word, say but, is a little more polite than, say, ass. Right? We know that ass is crasser than but.

Right.

And it’s not something that you will ever find recorded in any mainstream reference work at all. But we teach this to each other and we learn it from our environment. We find also there’s baggage associated with the placement of a word on a page. A lot of times if you ask people how they re-found a particular passage in a book, you said, go find this passage, they’ll say, well, I remembered it was on the right-hand side of the spread in the upper right-hand corner. And that helped me eliminate all the pages on the left side. You’re cutting your workload in half and then you’re cutting in half again because it’s in the upper right quadrant.

So it’s funny because it’s plugged so well into the content of the show. A lot of what we discuss on the show, if we’re going to look at it in a meta-narrative way, is about the things that we pass from person to person but never really get chronicles. They’re not taught in classes necessarily, usually. And the cultural things that move from person to person, it’s the meme basically prior to the Internet meme. It’s the facts and things and feelings that move along that aren’t just about dates and names.

Yeah, that’s fascinating.

And you really do absorb them. I mean, you don’t even have a consciousness of being aware. I mean, I don’t remember that kind of thing.

Yeah, I think it was Terry Pratchett, the science fiction writer who recently passed away, who called it white knowledge. These are the things that we all know and don’t know how we know. And so these are related. So you know that the letter M is purple in your mind, but you don’t know how you know it. You’ve forgotten how you’re past that tip.

Fascinating.

Cool stuff, right?

Yes.

We know there’s stuff in your mind that you’ve got questions about. You’re not quite sure how you know it. Where did you learn it? What does it mean? Why do you say it? This is the place we want to help you sort it out, 877-929-9673. Send an email to words@waywordradio.org. Talk to us on Twitter under the handle Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D, and join the thousands of people on our Facebook group where we have a really lively community of folks just like you.