Colour visualisation and mathematics

I was thinking about how I see colours when I think about certain concepts or calculations - I can't even really explain it - but I know that when I have to do a multiplication - I think in a colourful way. Like 7x7=49 is a smooth pale colour and it’s a fluid thing. It's really hard to describe, but that’s because I am trying to describe cognitively 'feeling' what is happening in my brain. This is hard to describe because we cannot physically feel what is happening in our brain when we do multiplication, but we can try to describe indirect feelings we have as a result. There are associations that I make with mathematics, like redback spiders, sun through windows, yellow, cold tiles, cream and brown, and hot milos - because my Nana was a mathematician and I always did tutoring at her house. She thought Math was beautiful. Her eyes would light up, she would talk about algorithms like old friends, and she would appreciate a proof and be excited, but not astounded, because it is just the way Math is - predictable.  I would love to sit at her big wooden table that my Pa made and stretch my legs out all over the corners and swing on my chair and think of any reason to have a break for a milo, or to collect red backs from their pot plants in a jar, or to eat some stewed apple with ice-cream that she would inevitably let me have. As long as I did ten more minutes. It was always a sunny afternoon in their sun room. 

Still, colours don't just arise in the mind because of object associations. I think of basketball as dark colours and startling ones - like black, purple and red. Its because its intense and rough. Rowing was hot and hard and long and sometimes cold, but it all pointed to hot colour's and hardship. No matter what life lesson s I learnt and what such a conceptual 'blue sky; it brought me later in life, it is still a red hot and orange memory. So, things, life events or collections of memories that evoke or once evoked emotions can be related to colours, but its not really as simple as that. Its just that I have an undercurrent of colour when I think , even during everyday events. Its not just a way to remember an event after the point, but its experienced simultaneously as the event happens. That event might be succeeding in understanding how to code a piece of software. The other day it was how to process multiple images and understand how we can do calculations on them more rapidly by getting the computer to compute the results in chunks (of an array or matrix) so that little rectangle chunks are calculated then there isn't a much in 'memory' and ultimately the process runs faster and smoother...as it happened the colours that were like marbled mixtures that often turn to brown (just like a marbling tub of water when you mix the colours too much) all of a sudden became clear distinct colours, and there were many....so I got very excited. 

I gave Nana a book once, it was called 'The Art of The Universe'  about astronomy and black holes; but it was all numbers. I wanted her to explain it to me so I didn’t have to understand the math. It scared me, or bored me, or just seemed impenetrable in a short period of time. I was impatient.  Now I see that Math expands the reach of the human mind, puts us in touch with the tiniest particles of physics, and takes us to the outermost reaches of the cosmos. Perhaps because of its power and its abstraction, math scares many people, as it scared me.