Numbers are People Too
Most of my life I’ve said I’m bad at math.
Eventually, however, I realized it’s not math in general. Specifically I’m bad at arithmetic. The problem is that the numbers have such strong personalities. They won’t shut up, and they keep resisting when I’m trying to manipulate them in even the simplest of equations.
Don’t believe me? You go talk with 2 when it’s dawdling about joining 8 in an equation even when the larger number is holding out a hand to her. You try reducing 7 by 3 when the smaller number is off doing cartwheels and doesn’t want to focus on what you want her to do. And god forbid you try to divide 9 by anything, because 9 thinks he’s perfectly sufficient in and of himself.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about or think everything in that previous paragraph is pure fantasy, then evidently you’re not familiar with ordinal-linguistic personification, which is a form of synesthesia. And maybe you haven’t even heard of synesthesia.
What you may have heard of is people who experience music or letters as colors. For example, when they hear a trumpet they might literally see the color orange. Or when they read the letter “A” they might perceive it as green even when it’s black text on a white page. Here is how Psychology Today defines this sort of strangeness:
Simply put, when one sense is…
