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JohnBull well, it’s the numbers that have colors, actually, lol. It’s a condition called synesthesia, or more specifically, grapheme-color synesthesia. Synesthesia is basically where your senses kinda get their wires crossed, and one sensory experience can trigger another. All types of synesthesia can be split into the more common
associative synesthesia (which is what I have) where you don’t necessarily perceive the colors or whatever in a literal sense, but part of you just automatically
knows that, for example, 2 is blue, 5 is yellow, A is green, etc., and the much rarer
projective synesthesia, where you literally see the colors with your eyes at the thought of the particular grapheme or whatever. A friend of mine actually has projective synesthesia, it’s neat. Synesthesia perceptions are quite stable; if you ask a synesthete in passing “what color is the number 5?” And they say yellow, and then ask them again 8 years later after they’ve long forgotten your prior conversation about it, their answer will still be yellow. These perceptions feel so completely natural, a lot of synesthetes do not realize until it’s pointed out that not everyone has these perceptions! Like many people with synesthesia, I have a few types of it. Grapheme-color synesthesia (colors for letters, numbers, symbols etc.) sequence-color synesthesia (very similar and often grouped in with grapheme-color, but it’s more conceptual, for example, for me all the days of the week have a specific color), chromesthesia (I see, or rather,
feel, perceive, whatever, colors when listening to music) and one much less common one: auditory-olfactory synesthesia (I can smell certain songs, mainly songs by The Driver Era, no idea why).
There’s
a lot of different forms of synesthesia. I’ve heard of cases where someone felt that every subway stop they were familiar with tasted like a different kind of soup, ones where numbers have genders and personalities and relationship dynamics (5 is jealous of 7, 3 makes 4 nervous so 4 would prefer to avoid 3, etc.).
