What does it mean when a person personifies or associates personalities to letters or numbers?

Question

As far back as I can remember I have associated personality traits to letters and numbers. As when you meet people and develop relationships with them you come to know them to be a certain way, I do the same thing with letters and numbers.

It's like this, when I see the letter "K", I think quiet and feminine. "7" is a cool masculine teenager or tweenager. "13" is a strong and older heavy set man. Capital "G" is a strong older female that smokes and lower case "g" is mean and rude.

I'm not crazy or anything. At least I don't think so. I'm a gifted law student with a relatively high IQ (141). I've always made associations with everything which can probably account for my excellent memory. But personifying characters is something I can't explain. I used to think everyone did this but when I mentioned this to friends and family they didn't get it. I stopped talking about it years ago. Now I want to know if anyone else does this. Any input would put my peculiar mind at ease.

Answer 1

I do similar things (I count things...like tiles on floors and bricks on walls). I think it's more of a sign of intelligence than it is of a "mental disorder"...that is as long as it does not consume your every waking thought. You're just one of those people who see relationships in things where others don't, or can't. Revel in it.

In the realm of psychological disorders, we all have "tendancies". But the difference between having a full-blown psych problem and just having some quirky aspects of a psych disorder lie in how well a person functions otherwise. Do I sit and count stuff all the time? No. Do I do it when I'm bored? Sometimes. Do I do it when I'm sitting in a bathroom stall and have nothing better to do? Yep.

There really is not such a thing as "normalcy". Who's to say what "normal" is anyway?

Is what you do considered a little OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder)? Perhaps...but anyone can have little OCD aspects and still be considered as "Normal" by the psychiatric community.

Thinking differently is not a curse, it's a gift.

Edited to add: I also find causal relationships in number groupings and sequences (like phone #s, account #s, PINs, etc.)...like the other answerer stated, it helps me remember numeric information through associations.

Answer 2

It is your way of remembering by association. There is nothing wrong with you. People with higher than average IQs tend to have patterns they follow for things like memory. Don't tell people. They can't understand how your mind works.