In electronics there is the color code for indicating the value of resistors and the like (When I was younger I spent a fair amount of time putting together Heathkit's and such).

  0 = black
  1 = brown
  2 = red
  3 = orange
  4 = yellow
  5 = green
  6 = blue
  7 = purple
  8 = grey
  9 = white

While I don't think of numbers as colors, sometimes I (still) think of colors as numbers...

As in

0	black	bad
1	brown	boys
2	red	rape err... ehem... race
3	orange	our
4	yellow	young
5	green	girls
6	blue	behind
7	violet	victorian
8	grey	garden
9	white	walls

Sorry... couldn't resist. Used that jingle from the time I was 8 to remember the color code for resistors. I am a long time electronics buff.

The jingle became more "R" rated when I went to BEE school in the US Navy.. :-)

In India it is, BB ROY of Great Britan has a Very Good Wife.

It was "... but Violet goes willingly" where I learned it.

Wow. I had no idea people did that.

Of course, I had no idea people could even see pictures in their head until I was 20 or so. My brain is all about sounds and physical positions. I remember phone numbers by saying them in my head repeatedly until the sequence of sounds is familiar, or sometimes by dialing the number three or four times until "my hand remembers".

Of course, most people expect other people to have visual recall (at a minimum) and visual imagination (hopefully). Since I have neither, I'm sometimes confused by instructions from others that are visually based, and by icons, especially when the interface is solely icon based. Ick.

merlyn,
Out of curiosity, are you able to solve those puzzles that give you some shape and ask to identify which other shape represents the original after some rotation or transformation. This is something men typically do better at then women. The other test that comes to mind is the one where you have some flat two dimensional shape and are asked which ones when folded along the edges will become boxes (or some other 3 dimensional shape).

It is completely possible that your brain is compensating in some other way, but it seems to me remembering someone's face would be impossible without some form of visual recall. You can pick out yourself in a group photo right?

Cheers - L~R

P.S. If you are interested in synesthesia, I recommend The Man Who Tasted Shapes

are you able to solve those puzzles that give you some shape and ask to identify which other shape represents the original after some rotation or transformation

No. Those are very tough. I solve them by naming the shape and then manipulating the sounds of the names of the shape. Like "a triangle pointed upward" rotated 180 degrees is "a triangle pointed downward". But if the shape is hard to name, I have a great difficulty.

The other test that comes to mind is the one where you have some flat two dimensional shape and are asked which ones when folded along the edges will become boxes (or some other 3 dimensional shape).

Again, something that is nearly impossible for me to do.

but it seems to me remembering someone's face would be impossible without some form of visual recall.

I mostly remember people by what they wear, or if they have name-able attributes (like "long blonde hair" or "glasses"). I pick myself out of a crowd because I usually wear the same things.

Learning a dance move is also difficult, because I can't go directly from seeing some move to moving that move. I have to see it, name every piece of it (inventing names as I go along if needed), then repeating the names in my head to trigger my body. And if it starts getting to be above the "7 +/- 2" threshold for total of "names of step" times "steps in the sequence", I can't keep all the different names straight, so I just go random.

For example, every beat of the macarena got translated into some phrase ("right hand on hip", "left hand on hip"), and those movements of that simple sequence are just about overload for me.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

IIRC, 65% of people are primarily visual, 25% are primarily auditory, and 10% are kinesthetic. I'm in the 10%.

While I can remember images and I can remember what was said, I don't naturally think either way.

As you point out, this can make it difficult to understand directions and interfaces that are intended for visual people.

zero  ;; (transparent)
one   ;; whi - white
two   ;; red - red
three ;; lgr - light green
four  ;; pur - purple
five  ;; yel - yellow
six   ;; dgr - dark green
seven ;; bla - black
eight ;; bro - brown
nine  ;; blu - blue
ten   ;; ora - orange
[download]

No, no, no. This being a tech-geek forum, you should all know the *real* color/number correspondance:

0	black
1	blue
2	green
3	cyan
4	red
5	magenta
6	brown/orange (dark yellow)
7	light grey
8	dark grey
9	bright blue
10	bright green
11	bright cyan
12	bright red
13	bright magenta
14	bright yellow
15	white

---

"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68

That's only one of them, the default palette used by VGA cards. But there's another one, the one used by vt100 terminals and internally by linux. That one has the red and blue bits swapped, like 0=black, 1=red, 2=green, 3=yellow, 4=blue etc. I know this because this second scheme is used by the \e]P palette changer escape sequence. (This is btw another proof why this is not the real color/number correspondence: that's only the deafult palette, you can change it to whatever you like. I've rebound magenta to orange once to display Rubik's cube patterns nicely.) The translation table between the rgb and bgr scheme is color_table in /linux/drivers/char/console.c.

Update: see also Re: What is the Perl Color?.

Surely black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, grey, white?

Or have I read one RS catalogue too many?

Good grief, and I thought *I* was the only one who learned counting with those. They go back to Kindergarten, 1963-64 at Elmwood Elementary in Rosemere, QC. I remember the ones (white) and twos (red), but that's about it.

I also remember making a plasticene snake several tables long with a bunch of laughing classmates, but .. that's not important right now.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

Strangely, I remember that we had similar rods in elementary school, but I think the color scheme was different. I'm sure 1 was white, but one of the shorter ones (2 or maybe 3) was light blue. Also, there were a few longer rods, I think 12 and 20 long ones.

I just checked the color scheme of the counting rods they're selling in the shops. (Yes, I could have done this any time in the previous eight years. Sorry for being late.)

• 1: white
• 2: light pink
• 3: light blue
• 4: red
• 5: yellow
• 6: purple
• 7: black
• 8: dark brown
• 9: dark blue
• 10: orange
• 12: green
• 16: light brown

0 = black
1 = brown
2 = red
3 = orange
4 = yellow
5 = green
6 = blue
7 = purple
8 = grey
9 = white

Note that this code is partly based upon a normal rainbow, in the range from 2/red to 7/purple. On the low side, you can imagine it going to black over the intermediate colour between red and black: brown; but on the upper side, that isn't so cut-and-dried.

Wow, that really is interesting, never heard of that either. I wonder if that's the simple difference between people who dream in color or black and white... a slight case of synesthesia...

Incidentally my brain is excruciatingly visual. For example, in school, I barely scraped off with a bottom dwelling B in algebra I and II. Geometry, however, was an A+ for me.

I just barely made it through mathematics in high school just because of my more-or-less intuitive grasp of geometry and spatial puzzles. Ofcourse then I had to do real algebra in university which was quite difficult.

I don't think my brain is very visual, but I do have trouble remembering people's names - I have to *remember* to remember their names, or I'll forget it in 5 minutes.

On the other hand, I love idioms and weird information, and I have no trouble at all remembering those - my brain is full of trivia and out-dated expressions.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

Yeah, I know what you mean. Hell, I *STILL* remember the license plate of one of my old girl friend's cars from 15 years ago. I'm jammed full of those weird idioms and trivias. I can still remember how to calibrate a commodore 1540 5 1/4" floppy drive, but I couldn't tell you the name of the person I just talked to on the phone. heh. Although I think that has more to do with my other condition (that I rarely speak of... ADD). ;)

--
naChoZ

Where in the nursery rhyme does it say Humpty Dumpty is an egg?

In my past, I've been spending too long hunting through bags of resistors. Their colour codes have become fairly ingrained.

 0 = black
 1 = brown
 2 = red
 3 = orange
 4 = yellow
 5 = green
 6 = blue
 7 = purple
 8 = grey
 9 = white