<\/p>\n
Fascinating popsci piece<\/a> on synaesthesia over at the BBC.\u00a0 It turns out that your common garden-variety hearing-colors\/seeing-music synaesthete is only the tip of the iceberg. There are people out there who can literally see time<\/em>, as a multicolored ribbon winding about them in mid-air. There are folks who perceive letters or numbers as personality types<\/em>, as in “seven is \u2026 a maniacal husband who comes home from work and shouts at his wife. Thursday \u2026 [is] a young girl who has spent too long kept in the house and wants to break out into the world”.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wild. And at the same time, why not? Synaesthesia’s a pretty simple phenomenon at its heart; all we’re talking about, basically, is wiring up two parts of the brain that usually aren’t so intimately connected. Let the visual cortex feed on signals from the auditory centers, and voila<\/em>: sound is perceived as sight.<\/span><\/p>\n Of <\/span>course<\/em> there’s no reason why the crosswired areas both have to be <\/span>sensory<\/em>. Instead of wiring sight to sound or taste, why <\/span>not<\/em> wire it to the object-recognition circuitry of the fusiform gyrus, or those nifty little time-series buffers in the right parietal cortex? Why <\/span>not<\/em> see time or emotions? Why <\/span>not<\/em> smell mathematical theorems?<\/span><\/p>\n But to me, the money shot for this article was its passing reference to “mirror touch synaesthesia<\/a>“, involving our old friends the mirror neurons<\/a>. As you know, Bob, specific suites of mirror neurons fire not only when we commit a physical act, but also when we see someone else commiting the same act. \u00a0 But victims of mirror touch synaesthesia go that one better; they literally feel your pain (at least, so long as you’re line-of-sight). If one of these folks happens to be watching as I punch you in the nose, <\/span>she<\/em> will feel my knuckles as readily as you do. If I gut you with a flensing knife, <\/span>he<\/em> will scream in agony.<\/span><\/p>\n