How Many of Us Are There?

When I was little, I thought everyone heard colors like I did. I didn’t realize I was “special” until my first grade art class. My teacher, turned on some music and said to color what we saw when we listened to the music. I remember getting very frustrated because I couldn’t find the right blue for my drawing. When I complained to my teacher he showed me almost every shade of blue he could find in his class room. When I didn’t find the color we had the following conversation.

My Teacher: “Can you describe the blue you want?”

Me: “It’s really hard, I don’t know to describe it. It’s the blue I heard in the music.”

My Teacher:“… you heard it in the music.”

Me:“yeah, it’s the blue I heard in my head.”

My Teacher: “…I think you’re mixing up what you hear and see.”

Me: “You don’t hear colors when you listen to music?”

My Teacher: “You can’t hear colors in music. No one can. You just have an overactive imagination.”

Me: “… I still can’t find the blue I need.”

My Teacher: “Just use one of the blues I gave you.”

Many synesthetes have this type of experience when they’re young. Once they find out that their perceptions are not normal, they usually do what I did and shut up about them. This is one of the main reason there is no set number of how many people have synesthesia. Guesses have ranged from 1 person out of 23 to one out of 2000 and up to one out of a million. Most people don’t talk about their synesthesia after childhood to avoid getting made fun of or just because other people just don’t understand.

Other reasons why no one exactly how many synesthetes there are include:

• Some people just don’t know they have it
• Synesthesia is not a common term. I didn’t know my colored hearing had a name until a couple of months ago when I enrolled in my Visual Music course that covered the subject

• There is no concrete way to diagnose synesthesia.
•   I’ve brought this up before, but synesthesia is completely subjective. Each synesthete has their own experiences. Combined with the numerous forms of synesthesia, this makes it very hard to tell if synesthetic perceptions are actually real.

The awareness of synesthetic perception is the basis for almost every reason synesthesia is so hard to figure out. The fact that perceptions are different for everyone or synesthetes just don’t notice them, just make synesthesia even more fascinating.