[HN Gopher] Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
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Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)
Author : iansteyn
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-11-02 05:47 UTC (8 days ago)
(HTM) web link (matthewjamestaylor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (matthewjamestaylor.com)
| susam wrote:
| I am not a synaesthete and I wonder how other non-synaesthetes
| perceived the '5 vs 2' diagram. Even though I see all the digits
| in plain black, the triangle of 2s immediately stood out to me.
| The author writes:
|
| _' For me, four-leaf clovers are a different shape so they stand
| out in a clover patch very much like this. Unlike letters and
| numbers, however, I don't get a sense of color, it's more like a
| sense of movement.'_
|
| But even as a non-synesthete, I felt a sense of movement in the
| 2s, as if they were little swans swimming against the bevy of 5s.
| But I felt no such movement when looking at the photographs of
| clovers. I could only spot a few four-leaf clovers at a quick
| glance because the pale markings on them form a rough
| quadrilateral, so I was essentially spotting those shapes rather
| than the four leaflets themselves.
|
| If this sort of topic interests you, I wrote an article earlier
| this year about number-colour-phoneme associations:
| https://susam.net/assoc.html
|
| As I mentioned, I do not have synaesthesia, yet the associations
| between numbers, colours and phonemes are quite strong in my mind
| due to early exposure to CGA colours and mnemonic systems. For
| instance, I find it hard to think of the number 1 without
| thinking of blue or the phonemes /t/ and /d/, or to think of 4
| without thinking of red or /r/. I have written more about it in
| the article linked above.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Yes, I am also inclined to believe this is just natural human
| psyche phenomenon.
|
| This very specific topic about clovers is one that I relate to,
| I've always found 4 leaf clovers faster. But I wouldnt say I
| have synesthesia.
|
| This has developed/manifested itself into looking for things on
| a computer screen, which I essentially do for a living. I can
| hold a piece of text in my head and scroll by quickly to search
| for it much faster than many of my peers.
|
| And as a child colors would also have numbers related to them
| in my mind, and vice versa. Which I attributed to number-coded
| coloring books.
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| >> I have several hundred [four leaf clovers]. I even have a few
| five-leaf clovers and a couple of sixers!
|
| That doesn't fit the ratios in my experience.. I find about 1
| five-leaf for every 5 four-leafers. They should have nearly 100
| five leafers, not merely "a few".
|
| EDIT: I checked and indeed the standard ratio is 4.8 four leaf
| clovers per five-leaf.
| https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/73279/distributi...
| hatthew wrote:
| I don't think they are uniformly distributed. Anecdotally, in
| my friend's backyard, the ratios I found were more like
| 10000 three-leaf 15 four-leaf 7 five-leaf
| 4 six-leaf 2 seven-leaf
|
| I would assume that the ratios in any given area can be quite
| different than another area.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This. The distribution varies greatly. Just like some patches
| have more 4 leaf clovers than other patches.
| exomonk wrote:
| So 2:1 for four-leaf:five-leaf?
|
| Seems to reinforce their point that this blog is bs
| jp57 wrote:
| I, too, experience some synethesia with letters and numbers (two
| is green, three is yellow, 4 is blue), but when I look at a field
| of clover, I don't experience a field of numbers representing the
| number of leaves on the individual clover stalks. In fact that
| seems like a weird way of perceiving nature. When I see a bird
| flying with its two wings outstretched, I'm not _experiencing_
| the number 2, and thus I get no sense of green.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Respectfully, I don't think synesthesia is behind OP's
| purported skill.
| pturing wrote:
| Hi, synesthesia researcher here! (1)
|
| Here's a few relevant things we know:
|
| - Synesthesia is not rare. You probably know someone that has
| synesthesia, even they haven't mentioned it.
|
| - There are many forms of synesthesia. Many documented forms
| that we know of, and very probably a bunch we haven't
| documented yet.
|
| - There are cases of tasks where we are able to measure
| enhanced performance of that task by synesthetes. (2)
|
| - While some synesthetes do have a single form of
| synesthesia, it is common for synesthetes to experience
| multiple forms. We've found cluster groups where subjects
| with a given form are more likely to have another form within
| the same cluster.
|
| From the other writings on the OP's site, we can see that
| they report to have at least two forms of Colored Sequence
| Synesthesia: Grapheme -> Color, and Day of the Week -> Color.
|
| Their report of their experience in the linked article sounds
| like possibly Shape -> Motion. This is a form they could
| have, and it's plausible that someone already known to be a
| multiple synesthete might also experience this.
|
| It is also plausible that someone with a Shape -> X type of
| synesthesia would be able use that to spot the odd shape out
| faster than others.
|
| ------
|
| (1) I maintained the online synesthesia battery for a number
| of years while working in the Eagleman Neuroscience Lab at
| Baylor College of Medicine
|
| (2) Some of these are ones that allowed us to study
| synesthesia on a larger scale by testing online! Among those,
| one particularly notable form of test is Stroop Interference.
| Genuine synesthetes are able to respond _much_ faster and
| more accurately, and we get a good clear separation between
| them and controls.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Interesting. Another thing I have that I didn't know about. I've
| found over 500 four leaf clovers as a kid. I still find them
| without looking as an adult when looking at something else on the
| ground or tying my shoe, etc. The movement thing isn't exactly
| like how I would describe it, but pretty close. It's almost like
| the eye auto focuses on it becuase it's different. Sometimes I
| would intentionally unfocus my eyes or concentrate on peripheral
| vision to make them jump out.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My mother used to find them all the time. I asked her how she
| did it and all she could say was that "I just notice them."
|
| I can only find them if I'm on my hands and knees searching a
| clover patch. I can't say how many I've found but I'd certainly
| guess a single-digit number.
| matsemann wrote:
| Same! Used to stop my bike hard on my way home to pick up one I
| just noticed in the peripheral of my vision at the edge of the
| road. No idea how, they just jumped out to me. Then put them
| between random pages in my moms old encyclopedias to press and
| preserve them. Got hundreds.
| iansteyn wrote:
| Meta-HN question from a newbie: Can someone help me understand
| why my 9-day-old submission is suddenly on the front page and
| says it's from 3 hours ago?
|
| Edit: Solved.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Could be something from the second-chance pool.
|
| See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
| iansteyn wrote:
| Aha, yep this is it. I got an email about it but didn't
| notice until just now.
| lawlessone wrote:
| I wonder if humans killing 4+ leaf clovers is enough of issue
| that they're selected against...
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The plant survives, even if the leaves get damaged. So it's not
| really selecting against them.
| hamdingers wrote:
| I'd imagine the practice of mowing introduces a lot of noise
| into that signal.
| sumnole wrote:
| It helps that the four leaf phenotype can be recessively
| carried and passed on by normal clovers.
| hamdingers wrote:
| How strange. I introduced clover to my lawn a few years ago for
| its nitrogen fixing properties, and since then have spent many
| idle minutes (probably adding up to hours) searching for four-
| leaf clovers.
|
| I have never found a single one, but easily picked out at least
| one in each of the pictures in the article in just a few seconds.
| Thinking this might be a breakthrough I went and snapped a few
| pictures of clover patches, but alas can't spot any. I suspect
| I'm getting subconscious hints from the author's framing of the
| photos.
| zeristor wrote:
| I keep thinking to make a start on a phone app to do this,
| there's probably a couple already.
|
| Highlighting clove type things that don't have 120deg.
| grvbck wrote:
| The distribution of four-leaf clovers is not uniform; they tend
| to cluster in certain areas. Many moons ago when I was a small
| kid, on my walk to school I had to walk a bit under high
| voltage power lines. Found tons of four-leaf clovers under
| there. I have no idea if the magnetic field did anything to
| help the mutation, or if it was just a coincidence, but I've
| never found a spot like that again.
| hansonkd wrote:
| I used to find a four leaf clover at least once a week during
| the summer when i was in the midwest. During the peak of
| summer, I could find 1-3 every time I took a walk.
|
| Since moving to california, I did find some up around the
| mountains of the bay area (including a 7 leaf clover), but
| not many elsewhere in town.
|
| In southern california I haven't found one yet.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > I'm getting subconscious hints from the author's framing of
| the photos.
|
| This is what I attributed my finding them so quickly as well.
| Unless the author was taking pictures intently to not
| prominently frame them for use in such an article, the nature
| of photography will make this a likely result.
| phyzome wrote:
| You might just not have any.
|
| It really varies by area, probably a mix of genes and
| environment. Some areas I can't find any, some areas are rich
| with them.
| zeristor wrote:
| Fascinating.
|
| This makes me wonder if there's a way to set data visualisation
| to make the most of this for those gifted people.
|
| I'm in a minority thinking that perhaps the limiting RGB colour
| gamut should be made into 4 colours to accommodate those people
| who can see four colours, tetrachromacy, ~95% of us have a visual
| impairment.
| zeristor wrote:
| Clover can't be the same species both sides of the Atlantic can
| it?
|
| Is American clover an invader, or a similar species from before
| tectonic plates drew out the Ocean?
| pessimizer wrote:
| People claiming that weird unfalsifiable (or often _unmeaningful_
| ) inner states give them magical powers has got to stop being
| respected.
|
| Thinking 4 is red doesn't mean that you don't have to count
| anymore. It's as stupid of a claim as claiming that "hearing
| colors" allows people to see in the dark.
|
| I'm a very, very fast minesweeper (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game) ) player,
| and I play in a non-marking style (meaning I just click where
| mines aren't rather than bothering to mark where mines are.) I
| realized one day that I subjectively see the spots that I know
| don't have mines as differently colored than the ones that I know
| do. That does not mean that I am not doing the calculations in my
| head, it just means that they are so reflexive that I don't
| notice them. Because I am trying to clear as fast as I can, I've
| seen every pattern thousands of times, and my feedback is visual,
| there's a ghostly sort of visual marking showing the _outcome of
| my calculation._
|
| This is similar to how people echolocate and have no idea that
| they're echolocating: "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious
| Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation"
| https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm
|
| We are not necessarily aware of what we are applying complex
| logic to, even when it requires delicate timing and swings wildly
| over tiny differences. I'd go even further and say that we are
| necessarily _less aware_ of calculations that we are making
| quickly, because being quick does not allow time for reflection.
|
| You've just gotten good at finding 4-leaf clovers because you
| spend an enormous amount of time looking for 4-leaf clovers.
| tokai wrote:
| Synesthesia is not well understood but it is a falsifiable
| phenomenon, and the medical consensus is very much that it
| exists.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Counterpoint: it is not a falsifiable phenomenon, and there
| is no medical consensus that it exists.
| iansteyn wrote:
| Source? Or is this satire
| pturing wrote:
| > unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful) inner states
|
| One of the great things about Synesthesia is that it is one of
| those places where we have in fact been able to study some
| really interesting things about perception by connecting it to
| external objective measures.
|
| We've been able to do this most of all with psychophysics
| testing, but in recent years we have also been able to connect
| this with genetics data and neural data via fMRI.
| pturing wrote:
| Start with these:
|
| Eagleman DM, Kagan AD, Nelson SN, Sagaram D, Sarma AK (2007). A
| standardized test battery for the study of Synesthesia. Journal
| of Neuroscience Methods. 159: 139-145
|
| Ward, J., Simner, J., Simpson, I., Rae, C., Del Rio, M.,
| Eccles, J. A., & Racey, C. (2024). Synesthesia is linked to
| large and extensive differences in brain structure and function
| as determined by whole-brain biomarkers derived from the HCP
| (Human Connectome Project) cortical parcellation approach.
| Cerebral Cortex, 34(11)
|
| Tomson SN, Avidan N, Lee K, Sarma AK, Tushe R, Milewicz DM,
| Bray M, Leal SM, Eagleman DM (2011). The genetics of colored
| sequence synesthesia: Suggestive evidence of linkage to 16q and
| genetic heterogeneity for the condition. Behavioural Brain
| Research. 223(2011):48-52
|
| Tomson SN, Narayan M, Allen GI, Eagleman DM (2013). Neural
| networks of colored sequence synesthesia. Journal of
| Neuroscience. 33(35):14098-106.
| thesz wrote:
| A case of Solomon Shereshevsky [1] is very relevant here.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky
|
| He had synesthesia that made him unable to forget things for most
| of the life. His memory was so good he was able to recite ten and
| more (10+) years old dialogues word-for-word, some of those
| included remembering and reciting long arbitrary numbers. How so?
| Because almost everything he saw, heard or read was fascinating
| in its' own unique way.
|
| (Shereshevsky had to learn how to forget things at later years of
| his life, successfully)
|
| I do not have synesthesia, yet I've found that if I have any sort
| of strong feeling - direct, or through association, - about any
| subject, I remember everything about that subject better. Also,
| these strong feelings allow me to find analogues relatively
| easier, enriching my reasoning.
|
| Richard Feynman described something like this in his
| autobiographies: when mathematicians told him to imagine two
| spheres, he imagined one as orange and the other one as hairy (or
| something like that). This way he was able to discover non-
| constructiveness of proofs, as non-constructive proofs have less
| use in physics.
|
| So, in my experience, one can use (or learn to use) rich feelings
| about many things to make memory better and to find better
| solutions to problems faster.
| Infernal wrote:
| Oh man, my grandmother was like this with finding four leaf
| clovers. She would just find them constantly, all the time, on
| command, or maybe while standing around having a conversation.
| Her description of it was "it's like they're just jumping up and
| waving at me" which somewhat fits with the author's description
| of motion. Never heard of anyone else like this though, neat to
| see others in the comments.
| phyzome wrote:
| I don't think synesthesia is necessarily a good explanation.
|
| I am quite good at spotting 4-leaf clovers, but I don't have
| synesthesia. My eye just "catches" on them. I'm pretty sure it's
| actually the _angle_ of the leaves that I 'm spotting, because
| almost all of the false positives are situations where leaflets
| are at a 90deg angle to each other.
|
| (But I've found 5, 6, and 7 leaf as well.)
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| same for me, but I've never found a 7 leaf (which is extra
| annoying as a futurama fan)
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| I've been able to find four-leaf clovers easily since I was a
| kid. Like the OP they seem to just "pop out" at me as I quickly
| scan the ground, but I do not have the same background with
| synesthesia.
|
| Since four and five leaf clovers tend to grow in patches, I
| transplanted a patch I found and have kept it in a planter on my
| deck so that anyone who has never found a four leaf clover can
| find one!
|
| I wrote about my lucky clover patch here:
| https://jherrman.com/four-leaf-clover-patch.html
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