New grapheme color synesthesia training chrome extension

[David Breneisen]

I've done dual n-back off and on since the Jaeggi paper days and remember this forum from back then, so it's cool to see there's still some activity, and progress has been made with the new n-back variants. I was reading through posts and came across one on grapheme color synesthesia and then read through some papers and posts on the Art of Memory forum. 

I found some chrome extensions for changing character colors but they didn't work well enough to be functional, so I ended up making a new one that focuses more on developing synesthesia, which is suggested to be possible by the research:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rainbow-text/jhkgcmdmjneppikhcokmmgjodcgcgdjp

It's open source and collects zero data:
https://github.com/davebren/rainbow-text

I really just made it for myself but it would be cool if some other people can make use of it. I've only been using it for about a week since settling on my color choices and I'm now at the point where I can close my eyes and go through the alphabet while visualizing each letter clearly. I think the word games are interesting since they train memorization of each word's color pattern, but that is going to take me a while to build up a vocabulary.

With each character being slightly different I believe it should also enhance color perception and visualization skills. Give it a try and let me know what you think. It would also be interesting to see long term reports on the effects.

[Henderson Blake]

Have you been playing synesthesia n back? I’m curious and I’d like to try it 

[David Breneisen]

No is there already an application for that? I can think of some ideas on how to design it but I'm curious what you have in mind.

I also threw together a prototype for an n-back game focused on color perception. Basically it would do color n-back with different shades of a single configurable base color, and with configurability to adjust the difficulty with the amount of variation between color shades. I think the concept works but it might be more interesting as a feature in a more complete n-back game. Or as a standalone game you could do dual, or triple n-back with multiple base colors. Anyway.I put that off for now while I'm working on an n-back version of tetris.

[Particular Reticular]

Hey David. Thanks for putting together this training tool. I finished setting up my personal color set and started practicing today. Would it be possible to add a keyboard toggle option between block colors and the default text? Whenever I want to check if I got a letter correct, I have to go to the extension, hit disable, and then refresh to get back to the default page.

On Monday, March 3, 2025 at 8:00:57 AM UTC-6 Tom wrote:

Amazing. Simply amazing.

[David Breneisen]

Those features should be available to you now.

[David Breneisen]

Would it be possible to add a keyboard toggle option between block colors and the default text? Whenever I want to check if I got a letter correct, I have to go to the extension, hit disable, and then refresh to get back to the default page.

Actually I'm not completely sure I understand, can you elaborate or possibly share a screenshot?

On Friday, March 14, 2025 at 8:39:30 PM UTC-4 Particular Reticular wrote:

[Particular Reticular]

Thanks! I noticed that the other day. I'm close to 100 words now and my speed continues to increase. So far I've noticed an uptick in dream recall and color awareness when I'm out driving, which makes sense but is still cool to experience. 

[Particular Reticular]

Disregard the keyboard toggle. I wasn't confident in my color recognition in the hardcore mode and wanted to quickly toggle in and out to confirm if I got the block color reading correct. Now that I've internalized my color codes(other than x, y and z lol) I don't think it's a necessary feature to add in.