Synesthesia is when you hear music and see shapes. Or you look at a number and see the color red. It’s when you experience one of your senses through another. You may see a particular shape when you hear certain notes of music. And it remains the same throughout your life. For example, if you see the number 13 as blue, you will always see it as blue. You can’t control it, it is an automatic response.

I discovered when I was in my twenties that I have a form of synesthesia called “ordinal linguistic personification,” which means that my brain automatically associates numbers and letters with gender, and often there is a personality associated with the number. It is an automatic response, and the answer is the same every time. For example, the number three is a very sweet little boy. The number 7 is a mean teenage girl.

I discovered I had it when I was at he breakfast table with my family, and I said “the number seven is such a bitch.” and they looked at me strangely. I questioned them further, “don’t you think she’s mean?” The puzzled looks continued. It was then I realized that to them the number 7 was just the number seven. I asked about the number three, as he is another strong character. Still no understanding from the people around me. I was telling a friend about my experience and she recommended the book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Richard E. Cytowic.

I remembered back to kindergarten, when I would look at the alphabet displayed around the room and in my head I would say, “A is female, B is a boy, C is a boy, D is a boy, E is a boy, F is a boy, G is a boy, H is a girl…” and I would continue all the way to Z. There were only very vague feelings of personalities with letters, but there was a very strong sense that W, X, Y, and Z, were in a girl gang together. And B was a sweet little boy, much like 3, but younger.

I helped a friend discover he had synesthesia. One day we were talking online and I asked if I could spell his name with a lower case d because I liked his personality more than an upper case D, and I explained why. He said he thought everybody did that, and he was surprised to learn that it was a thing. His relationships in letters were much stronger than mine, he knew that the number 7 was protective of the number 3, and that 4 and 8 were working on a science project together. As you can see, not everyone has the same association, and they will even argue with you as they feel so sure about it. We had to agree to disagree about the number 7.

Synesthesia, according to Psychology today, is found in 1 of every 2,000 people. It is most common in writers, artists and musicians. Synesthesia is almost three times higher in people on the autism spectrum than in the general population.

I sometimes wonder if math was a struggle for me because I would sense the genders and personalities as I tried to compute, and there is a very subtle “pushing that to the back of my mind” that has to occur before I can do any computations. They would pop back up and I would have to push them back again, so it’s very noisy in my head when I do math.

Most of the time, I don’t even think about synesthesia, it is so subtle and automatic for me, but it is just another quirky thing to add to my list of qualities.