Oh man, my grandmother was like this with finding four leaf clovers. She would just find them constantly, all the time, on command, or maybe while standing around having a conversation. Her description of it was "it's like they're just jumping up and waving at me" which somewhat fits with the author's description of motion. Never heard of anyone else like this though, neat to see others in the comments.
Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
#32I, too, experience some synethesia with letters and numbers (two is green, three is yellow, 4 is blue), but when I look at a field of clover, I don't experience a field of numbers representing the number of leaves on the individual clover stalks. In fact that seems like a weird way of perceiving nature. When I see a bird flying with its two wings outstretched, I'm not experiencing the number 2, and thus I get no sens…
Respectfully, I don't think synesthesia is behind OP's purported skill.
Hi, synesthesia researcher here! (1)
Here's a few relevant things we know:
- Synesthesia is not rare. You probably know someone that has synesthesia, even they haven't mentioned it.
- There are many forms of synesthesia. Many documented forms that we know of, and very probably a bunch we haven't documented yet.
- There are cases of tasks where we are able to measure enhanced performance of that task by synesthetes. (2)
- While some synesthetes do have a single form of synesthesia, it is common for synesthetes to experience multiple forms. We've found cluster groups where subjects with a given form are more likely to have another form within the same cluster.
From the other writings on the OP's site, we can see that they report to have at least two forms of Colored Sequence Synesthesia: Grapheme -> Color, and Day of the Week -> Color.
Their report of their experience in the linked article sounds like possibly Shape -> Motion. This is a form they could have, and it's plausible that someone already known to be a multiple synesthete might also experience this.
It is also plausible that someone with a Shape -> X type of synesthesia would be able use that to spot the odd shape out faster than others.
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(1) I maintained the online synesthesia battery for a number of years while working in the Eagleman Neuroscience Lab at Baylor College of Medicine
(2) Some of these are ones that allowed us to study synesthesia on a larger scale by testing online! Among those, one particularly notable form of test is Stroop Interference. Genuine synesthetes are able to respond much faster and more accurately, and we get a good clear separation between them and controls.
Re: Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
#33I don't think synesthesia is necessarily a good explanation.
I am quite good at spotting 4-leaf clovers, but I don't have synesthesia. My eye just "catches" on them. I'm pretty sure it's actually the angle of the leaves that I'm spotting, because almost all of the false positives are situations where leaflets are at a 90° angle to each other.
(But I've found 5, 6, and 7 leaf as well.)
Re: Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
#34I've been able to find four-leaf clovers easily since I was a kid. Like the OP they seem to just "pop out" at me as I quickly scan the ground, but I do not have the same background with synesthesia.
Since four and five leaf clovers tend to grow in patches, I transplanted a patch I found and have kept it in a planter on my deck so that anyone who has never found a four leaf clover can find one!
I wrote about my lucky clover patch here: https://jherrman.com/four-leaf-clover-patch.html
Re: Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
#35I don't think synesthesia is necessarily a good explanation. I am quite good at spotting 4-leaf clovers, but I don't have synesthesia. My eye just "catches" on them. I'm pretty sure it's actually the angle of the leaves that I'm spotting, because almost all of the false positives are situations where leaflets are at a 90° angle to each other. (But I've found 5, 6, and 7 leaf as well.)
same for me, but I've never found a 7 leaf (which is extra annoying as a futurama fan)
Re: Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
#36How strange. I introduced clover to my lawn a few years ago for its nitrogen fixing properties, and since then have spent many idle minutes (probably adding up to hours) searching for four-leaf clovers. I have never found a single one, but easily picked out at least one in each of the pictures in the article in just a few seconds. Thinking this might be a breakthrough I went and snapped a few pictures of clover patch…
You might just not have any.
It really varies by area, probably a mix of genes and environment. Some areas I can't find any, some areas are rich with them.
Re: Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
#37People claiming that weird unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful ) inner states give them magical powers has got to stop being respected. Thinking 4 is red doesn't mean that you don't have to count anymore. It's as stupid of a claim as claiming that "hearing colors" allows people to see in the dark. I'm a very, very fast minesweeper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game) ) player, and I play in a non…
Synesthesia is not well understood but it is a falsifiable phenomenon, and the medical consensus is very much that it exists.
Counterpoint: it is not a falsifiable phenomenon, and there is no medical consensus that it exists.
Re: Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
#38People claiming that weird unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful ) inner states give them magical powers has got to stop being respected. Thinking 4 is red doesn't mean that you don't have to count anymore. It's as stupid of a claim as claiming that "hearing colors" allows people to see in the dark. I'm a very, very fast minesweeper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game) ) player, and I play in a non…
> unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful) inner states
One of the great things about Synesthesia is that it is one of those places where we have in fact been able to study some really interesting things about perception by connecting it to external objective measures.
We've been able to do this most of all with psychophysics testing, but in recent years we have also been able to connect this with genetics data and neural data via fMRI.
Re: Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
#39People claiming that weird unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful ) inner states give them magical powers has got to stop being respected. Thinking 4 is red doesn't mean that you don't have to count anymore. It's as stupid of a claim as claiming that "hearing colors" allows people to see in the dark. I'm a very, very fast minesweeper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game) ) player, and I play in a non…
Start with these:
Eagleman DM, Kagan AD, Nelson SN, Sagaram D, Sarma AK (2007). A standardized test battery for the study of Synesthesia. Journal of Neuroscience Methods. 159: 139-145
Ward, J., Simner, J., Simpson, I., Rae, C., Del Rio, M., Eccles, J. A., & Racey, C. (2024). Synesthesia is linked to large and extensive differences in brain structure and function as determined by whole-brain biomarkers derived from the HCP (Human Connectome Project) cortical parcellation approach. Cerebral Cortex, 34(11)
Tomson SN, Avidan N, Lee K, Sarma AK, Tushe R, Milewicz DM, Bray M, Leal SM, Eagleman DM (2011). The genetics of colored sequence synesthesia: Suggestive evidence of linkage to 16q and genetic heterogeneity for the condition. Behavioural Brain Research. 223(2011):48-52
Tomson SN, Narayan M, Allen GI, Eagleman DM (2013). Neural networks of colored sequence synesthesia. Journal of Neuroscience. 33(35):14098-106.
Re: Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Synesthesia is not well understood but it is a falsifiable phenomenon, and the medical consensus is very much that it exists.
Counterpoint: it is not a falsifiable phenomenon, and there is no medical consensus that it exists.
Source? Or is this satire