Some time ago, the PO and the BW had a long and fascinating conversation about the BW's chromesthetic tendencies.
Chromesthesia (sometimes spelt chromaesthesia) is a specific variant of synesthesia (or synaesthesia).
And what, I hear you ask, is synesthesia ? Well, it's when you experience a reaction to some form of sensory stimulation that manifests itself through one of the senses other than that you would normally expect. So for example, on listening to a piece of music you smell something.
Probably the most common form of chromesthesia is coloured hearing - you hear music or a particular sound, and you see a colour. It was something similar to this that the BW explained to me - except that in his case, it wasn't music that was stimulating the colour sensation - it was the days of the week. He explained to me in great detail how he felt the colour of each day of the week, and how this was relatd to the way he looked forward to the days ahead of him.
I was reminded of our conversation a few days ago when I came across this site. It turns out that as part of the Biennale Design in 2004, a designer came up with the idea of producing a set of tee-shirts, one for each day of the week. And to do so, she asked a group of contributors to vote for the colour they most associated with each day.
I don't remember exactly what colour each day of the week was in the BW's own personal rainbow calendar, but I half-remember that Thursdays were brown for him. And the colour of the Thursday tee-shirt ? Brown, of course...
The project, it seems did not end there - by clicking here, you can go to a page where you can vote on the colour you associate with each day. And you can see the latest results, which interestingly are sometimes identical and sometimes very different from those used to create the initial tee-shirts. For example, Saturday remains red, and Sunday is still white. But, predictably perhaps, Monday has changed from light blue to grey...
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