312 COLOURED THINKING 



is no approach towards unanimity in the colours thought of 

 in association with any one concept or word; for instance, 

 for Saturday the colours selected at random from records in 

 my possession are white, yellow, steel-grey, white-grey, 

 crimson, brown. The coloured thought may be called a 

 psychochrome, and persons who think in colours psycho- 

 chromsesthetes, the faculty or disposition to think in colours 

 being psychochromsesthesia. Something analogous to this is 

 the case of the blind man alluded to by Locke ( x ) to whom 

 scarlet was "like the sound of a trumpet." 



Apparently the concepts to be most commonly coloured 

 are those for the vowels, the consonants, the months, the 

 days, and the hours of the day. Thus the vowel "a" as in 

 "fame" is mentally coloured in the following five ways in 

 five different persons red, black, green, white-grey, and 

 white respectively. Or take the vowel "u" as in "usual", 

 we find it psychically coloured as grey-white, yellow, black, 

 brown, blue, and green in six different coloured thinkers. 

 Similarly whole words are associated with colours in the 

 minds of this class of thinkers. One person says he divides 

 all words into two great classes, the dark and the light. 

 Random examples of dark words are man, hill, night, horse, 

 Rome, London, and of light, sea, child, silver, year, day, 

 and Cairo. Or again, another coloured thinker divides up 

 the numerals into those associated with cold colours, grey, 

 black, blue, green; and those with warm, red, yellow, orange, 

 brown, purple, and pink. The odd numbers have the cold 

 colours; the even, the warm. In some cases, as might be 

 expected, the coloured concepts are appropriate or natural 

 as when thejword scarlet is scarlet; black, black; and white, 

 white. But an examination of psychochromes shows us 

 that this reasonableness does not necessarily always occur. 

 Thus, the word "apple" is to one coloured thinker a slate 

 grey, which is not the colour of any real apple; and the word 

 "cucumber" to the same person is white; now only the inside 

 of the vegetable itself is white. 



