I get lots of questions if and when friends find out that I have Synesthesia, that rare crosswiring of the senses that allows some to feel sounds, some to hear sights, and me (and others with the “colored grapheme” variety) to see numbers, letters and other abstractions — months, places, school subjects — in full-blown color.

“What color is my name?” they ask. (Depends on the sounds and letters in your name.)

“Have you always had this?” (As long as I can remember.)

“Do you actually SEE the colors on the page?” (Kind of.)

“What are you smoking, and where can I get some?” (Screw you, too.)

It sounds crazy, I admit, but I’m far from alone. According to Wikipedia — yes, I did exhaustive research for this column — “Estimates of the prevalence of Synesthesia have varied widely (from 1 in 20 to 1 in 20,000).”

The numbers are so imprecise because Synesthesia is nearly impossible to identify and measure. Some people, after all, don’t “discover” that they have Synesthesia until they hear it described by someone else. (I didn’t know there was an actual name for it until I saw a television special in high school.)

Even now, I don’t pay much attention to it — no more than to breathing — mostly because it doesn’t come up in conversation and because most people have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. Yes, most understand what’s meant by a “sharp cheese” or a “loud shirt” — but an orange Tuesday? Explaining Synesthesia to someone who’s never experienced it is like explaining pregnancy to a man, or democracy to an Iraqi.

You can imagine, then, that I was excited last semester to read in Kitsch that there was at least one more of us on this campus. (The world’s most famous synesthete, Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, left Cornell almost 50 years ago.) The magazine’s fall issue had a feature on Synesthesia by one Kate Meyer ’10, who explored the phenomenon and her form of it (the same as mine):

When I read, I can identify the actual color of the text (usually black), but it’s as if my colors are superimposed or shaded onto the letters. The hodge-podge of juxtaposed colors has consistently splattered my life with many moments of confusion, frustration (unappealing letter colors, suspicion of drug usage), isolation, as well as hilarity, intrigue and beautiful literary art.

Um, yeah ... what she said.

I suppose that if I were ever to meet Kate, we’d marvel at our odd similarity for a few minutes and then spend hours arguing over the proper color of a 7 (yellow).

I say that jokingly, of course, because while seeing 2’s in red and D’s in brown is for me almost as natural as seeing bananas in yellow, I recognize that I’m not tapping in to some otherworldly dimension that only I and other synesthetes can see — though that would be cool. It’s all in my head.

Which begs the question: How did it get there?

The simple answer is genetics. The little research that’s been done on Synesthesia suggests that it runs in families — my father has it — and is disproportionately prevalent among women and lefties.

As for the particular associations, which aren’t inherited, it can be hard to tell.

At least in my case, the process by which abstractions acquire color — or, more often, colors — is at times gradual, often spontaneous, largely subconscious and something over which I have little to no control (I’ve tried).

Once my mind has decided what colors to assign each of my semester’s classes, for instance, there’s no turning back. I can only surmise how “I” got there and curse the Cornell Store for running out of folders that “match.”

Sometimes, when bored, I’ll try to trace the origins of my more enduring associations.

The geographical ones are the easiest to pin down. For example, I see most North American cities in the colors of their respective Major League Baseball teams. Cincinnati has always been red, Baltimore orange, Pittsburgh yellow, Oakland green, Toronto blue and Philadelphia purplish.

I assume that France (and French, for that matter) is orange because of the color of French salad dressing, which I’ve loved since I was five. Ditto for Italy/Italian (yellow) and Russia/Russian (pinkish orange).

Some associations rub off on related ones. Because Louisiana is yellow, New Orleans became yellow (or was it the other way around?). Because New Orleans is yellow, Tulane University became yellow. Because Tulane University is yellow, that jerk from Tulane who vomited on my floor last fall … okay, let’s not go there.

So, yeah, those pairings make sense. Others — how in the name of Jesus did Wyoming become pink ? — make none at all (though I guess the release of Brokeback Mountain vindicates me somewhat on that one).

Most of the time, it’s not so clear-cut. If a word evokes any color at all (most don’t), it’ll likely be, as Kate wrote, a “hodge-podge” of them. And if you step back, and start paying attention, the world quickly becomes a kaleidoscope of colors, images and shapes that make no sense at all.

I’ve heard some people compare Synesthesia to a continual acid trip. I like the sound of that — or, should I say, the “color” of that?

Ben Birnbaum is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at bhb9@cornell.edu. Infomaniacs Anonymous appears Tuesdays.