What is the advantage of learning to think of numbers and letters in different colors? I would assume that reading 50,000 words in color would change a person’s performance on a stroop test!! But what practical difference does it make?
One thing that would be nice for those using a 2-card system would be cards with the indexes all different colors. Then you would associate objects along an axis perpendicular to the associations made by similar suit-combinations.
Loci: Any extra images/associations give potential for increasing the performance of our memory, which is after all largely visually based. These colour associations could make it easier to remember words; for example if we associate someone’s name with some colours it instantly becomes more memorable (although strong synaesthetes have said that they may confuse similarly coloured names).
I found an interesting link to a bookmarklet which will colour (most of) the text within the current webpage you’re running:
http://elankiderman.com/ss.html
which is quite neat, so I’ve adapted that to use an version of my major system colours (I haven’t turned k’s and g’s white, though, as they’d disappear on many pages I visit). So I now have a link on my browser toolbars that will convert the current page to MY colours (unfortunately it won’t behave on mobile). In fact I’ve been reading this page as multicoloured. I’ll see how I get on with these for a couple of months to see how much the associations become automatic. For the first twenty minutes when I started with it yesterday it was hard to read the multicoloured text (and I started with too pale a yellow which tended to disappear into the background, but I quickly updated this); now it’s only a little slower than reading monochrome text (though still harder to scan through).
Hey guys. Awesome thread.
I wanna convert some of ma ebooks to color.
How cud I go about doing this??
Great resource Josh! This is so cool.
I just saw a cool article on sciencedaily.com
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140309150441.htm
Might be thought provoking for those of you wanting to induce synesthesia. Basically they’re now making visual-sound translators for the blind. Maybe we could use the translator and our eyes as well to associate sounds with visual stimuli.
Intelligent Introvert
Great work Josh! You must have put a lot of effort in making this possible, thanks :).
As i understood, this http://mnemotechnics.net/output/ is the final version? It would be great if you could post some program outline with correct links. Many links have different colors for the letters. Which is the one used for the poetry?
And, did i miss any books that you have colorized and made available? I read that you wanted to read The Trial this way.
What is you thoughts of the program, did you have time to practice it and did you gain any benefits?
The scripts that generated the output are here and here.
All the colors should be consistent. See post #19 above. If you see something inconsistent, let me know which PDF it is, and I’ll see if I can fix it. 
I read ~1.5 of those books colorized. It’s a little difficult to read PDF documents on my phone, so maybe the next version will be in epub format so that the text wraps when the font size is increased.
I read The Trial, but not colorized, because I wanted to read a specific translation, which I couldn’t get in text format.
I plan to experiment with this further in the future in epub format, but it might take me a little while to get everything set up.
Here’s an interesting related article:
How we all could benefit from synaesthesia
Studies such as one carried out by Dr Clare Jonas at the University of East London aim to take that link between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes one step further, by training non-synaesthetes to have the same associations that synaesthetes have – and then assessing the impact their newly acquired synaesthesia has on their memory and cognitive function.That’s where the word test comes in. After training a small group of young adults to associate certain letters with certain colours, the researchers use the test to find out if they remember words more easily if they are coloured to match their synaesthetic training.
So far, the results seem to suggest that they do. The researchers assessed participants’ memory before and after the synaesthesia training, by getting them to look at a list of words in which there was an odd one out – either a word written in the colour they had been taught to associate with it or a word whose meaning did not fit in with the rest of the list.
Awesome
Wow… thank you Josh for sharing this.
Hi Josh. Could you plese write some instructions on how to use the script at the GitHub page. I mean, how should i use it? Can i upload a PDF somewhere and return that PDF with colorized text? Where do i need the to write or upload the doc i need colorized?
If you email me a text file, I can send it back to you with colors. The file should be TXT format with a .txt file extension. [email protected]
Aha, i was hoping it could do pdf files since most of my articles are in that format. I have to read 25+ articles for my thesis and thought that i could colorize them to experiment with this theory, but all are in a pdf format. So i would really need a pdf converter.
I have no experience in scriptlanguages, although, i know a bit of C# and Java. Did some googeling and i think it shouldnt be that dificult to create such a program with the help of iTextSharp. I.e. a program that takes in a pdf and export it with the colors. I have never worked with pdf in visual studio before though :(. You dont happen to know how to do one?
I will try to make something like this, but i dont know how much time i have with the thesis writing and everything.
I don’t know how to add colors to a PDF document, but another idea is to extract the text:
https://www.google.com/search?q=pdf+to+text
Hi Josh,
I recoded your code for coloring to javaScript.
With this code you can simply open index.html, open file and click the button.
There are also additional buttons for aligning.
I cannot attatch it 
If it is possible I can push it to your git hub repository on another brunch.
Kind regards,
Peter M.
Yes, i was thinking about that approach, making all the pdf to text. But since there are so mandy PDF that would be quite troublesome. I think this experiment would be alot easier to accomplish if there where a program that easily did this conversion. The ideal solution would even keep the spacing and style of the origian pdf, just change the colors. I know this is possible, but i can imagine this would take a lot of time. Changing colors of a pdf can be done with the Lib i mentioned before, like mikesdotnetting
@Peter Alpak
Thanks – I’ll send you a message.
@wayweary:
You could extract the text this way:
http://pdf2html.tabesugi.net:8080/
You can use that tool on the command line like this.
(I’m not familiar with .NET.)
I have created new synesthesia colorer.
It is written in javascript.
It is on git hub: https://github.com/Alpak1987/synesthesis
You can download it, unpack and simply open index.html in browser.
Next you have to open txt file and click the button.
Randomly saw this in a sidebar on science daily while searching for information on something completely unrelated.
Quotes:
“The main implication of our study is that radically new ways of experiencing the world can be brought about simply through extensive perceptual training.”
“One of the most surprising outcomes of the study was that those who underwent the training also saw their IQ jump by an average of 12 points, compared to a control group that didn’t undergo training.”
Bateman
I found on the internet that someone is trying to crowd fund an app based on the idea of coloured letters, called “ColoReading”. It promises that it will increase your reading speed.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/read-faster-through-an-innovative-technology
It looks like baloney to me. They don’t help their case by giving Daniel Tammet as an example of someone with extreme memory skills through synaesthesia. So I won’t be wasting my money on that! In the meantime, I’m trying out some of the interesting free stuff in this thread.
Still, interesting that others are looking at the same kind of idea.
@Bateman, I have also read something similar at the BrainHQ site, or maybe he mentioned it in the book “the brain that changes itself”. Like why old people lose “IQ” bc they get wore eyes, hehe.
@Tomasyi, Interesting link, the funny thing is that i just saw it now, and before the whole day i have spent time on making just such an app for android 
hehe.
//
Okey, i finally felt that i had a day off of working on my thesis, so i have spent almost the whole day working on a way to create an app for android, where you can import a pdf and have that pdf exported back colorized. Would be cool if we here at mnemonics could create an app together which not only colorizes your pdf but also create some kind of program on how to get synesthetic (if possible). I mean lessons, exercises, guidelines etc. I will upload the project on github soon. I hope there are any programmers here :). Could be a good learning experience as well.
Could someone please interpret the color scheme for me. I am looking at the style.css now and i thought Josh gave each letter a color. But it seems like there are combinations of letters that have a color when appeared in a certain order? Like when the letters el are together both get a dark yellow color? Or how to interpret this:
.el, .Eu, #el, #Eu { color: #e7a800; }