Synesthesia, the merging of senses

Day 129 / 365

Our brain is an extremely complex organ and even with all the advances in neuroscience we still have a long way to go in understanding it. Underneath it all, it’s just a lot of neurons firing electrical signals, and somehow that gets translated into our thoughts, our memories our entire consciousness.

With a system so complex we are sure to have cases outliers, cases where the brain behaves in a way that’s different from the norm. One example of this is Synesthesia.

What’s Synesthesia?

Synesthesia is a condition in which a person perceives more than one senses simultaneously. It’s like one of the senses causes the perception of another sense that shouldn’t be there, like feeling the taste of a good song that you are hearing or seeing the color of different feelings of pain. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes.

I personally have a mild case of synesthesia, I perceive different colors for different numbers. For example, while watching a cricket match as the score of a batsman moves from the 80s to 90s, the color of that score in mind changes from blue to red.

This is actually a common form of Synesthesia known as grapheme-color synesthesia.

Mirror-touch synesthesia

While numbered colors might not seem so unusual, Mirror-touch synesthesia — a rare form of synesthesia, is anything but usual.

People suffering from this condition would feel the same sensations that someone else is feeling, in the same part of the body. So if they see someone in front of them touching their cheek, they would feel the same sensation on their own cheek!

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog —Focus on the journey, not the destination