That doesn't fit the ratios in my experience.. I find about 1 five-leaf for every 5 four-leafers. They should have nearly 100 five leafers, not merely "a few".
EDIT: I checked and indeed the standard ratio is 4.8 four leaf clovers per five-leaf. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/73279/distributi...
10000 three-leaf
15 four-leaf
7 five-leaf
4 six-leaf
2 seven-leaf
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.
I can only find them if I'm on my hands and knees searching a clover patch. I can't say how many I've found but I'd certainly guess a single-digit number.
Edit: Solved.
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 patches, but alas can't spot any. I suspect I'm getting subconscious hints from the author's framing of the photos.
Highlighting clove type things that don’t have 120°.
Since moving to california, I did find some up around the mountains of the bay area (including a 7 leaf clover), but not many elsewhere in town.
In southern california I haven't found one yet.
This is what I attributed my finding them so quickly as well. Unless the author was taking pictures intently to not prominently frame them for use in such an article, the nature of photography will make this a likely result.
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.
This makes me wonder if there’s a way to set data visualisation to make the most of this for those gifted people.
I’m in a minority thinking that perhaps the limiting RGB colour gamut should be made into 4 colours to accommodate those people who can see four colours, tetrachromacy, ~95% of us have a visual impairment.
Is American clover an invader, or a similar species from before tectonic plates drew out the Ocean?
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-marking style (meaning I just click where mines aren't rather than bothering to mark where mines are.) I realized one day that I subjectively see the spots that I know don't have mines as differently colored than the ones that I know do. That does not mean that I am not doing the calculations in my head, it just means that they are so reflexive that I don't notice them. Because I am trying to clear as fast as I can, I've seen every pattern thousands of times, and my feedback is visual, there's a ghostly sort of visual marking showing the outcome of my calculation.
This is similar to how people echolocate and have no idea that they're echolocating: "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation" https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm
We are not necessarily aware of what we are applying complex logic to, even when it requires delicate timing and swings wildly over tiny differences. I'd go even further and say that we are necessarily less aware of calculations that we are making quickly, because being quick does not allow time for reflection.
You've just gotten good at finding 4-leaf clovers because you spend an enormous amount of time looking for 4-leaf clovers.
One of the great things about Synesthesia is that it is one of those places where we have in fact been able to study 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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky
He had synesthesia that made him unable to forget things for most of the life. His memory was so good he was able to recite ten and more (10+) years old dialogues word-for-word, some of those included remembering and reciting long arbitrary numbers. How so? Because almost everything he saw, heard or read was fascinating in its' own unique way.
(Shereshevsky had to learn how to forget things at later years of his life, successfully)
I do not have synesthesia, yet I've found that if I have any sort of strong feeling - direct, or through association, - about any subject, I remember everything about that subject better. Also, these strong feelings allow me to find analogues relatively easier, enriching my reasoning.
Richard Feynman described something like this in his autobiographies: when mathematicians told him to imagine two spheres, he imagined one as orange and the other one as hairy (or something like that). This way he was able to discover non-constructiveness of proofs, as non-constructive proofs have less use in physics.
So, in my experience, one can use (or learn to use) rich feelings about many things to make memory better and to find better solutions to problems faster.
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.)
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
susam•1w ago
'For me, four-leaf clovers are a different shape so they stand out in a clover patch very much like this. Unlike letters and numbers, however, I don't get a sense of color, it's more like a sense of movement.'
But even as a non-synesthete, I felt a sense of movement in the 2s, as if they were little swans swimming against the bevy of 5s. But I felt no such movement when looking at the photographs of clovers. I could only spot a few four-leaf clovers at a quick glance because the pale markings on them form a rough quadrilateral, so I was essentially spotting those shapes rather than the four leaflets themselves.
If this sort of topic interests you, I wrote an article earlier this year about number–colour–phoneme associations: https://susam.net/assoc.html
As I mentioned, I do not have synaesthesia, yet the associations between numbers, colours and phonemes are quite strong in my mind due to early exposure to CGA colours and mnemonic systems. For instance, I find it hard to think of the number 1 without thinking of blue or the phonemes /t/ and /d/, or to think of 4 without thinking of red or /r/. I have written more about it in the article linked above.
Atlas667•1h ago
This very specific topic about clovers is one that I relate to, I've always found 4 leaf clovers faster. But I wouldnt say I have synesthesia.
This has developed/manifested itself into looking for things on a computer screen, which I essentially do for a living. I can hold a piece of text in my head and scroll by quickly to search for it much faster than many of my peers.
And as a child colors would also have numbers related to them in my mind, and vice versa. Which I attributed to number-coded coloring books.