Synesthesia :: Biology Medical Medicine Research

In the mornings, my cat often takes up a post on my chest. His armorial bearing is heralded by a chirpy meow and four quarter-sized points of compress where his feet make contact as he relaxes, he settles into a loud, syncopated churr, and the pressure of his 16 pounds is more evenly distributed across my ventral torso. If Im dim to open my eyes, he reaches out a paw and gently pricks my verbalism with his claws enough to make an impression but not do substantive damage. When I do open my eyes, I see the triangles of his ears, the dense, velvety lightlessness of his fur and the sheen of his nose his yellow irises be thin go around his dilated pupils in the dim, early light. Suppose I viewd both of those stars up to the point of opening my eyes the pressure of my cats weight and the pricks of his claws, his meowing and his purr and then I opened my eyes to the absence of any opthalmic evidence of a cat. Id be confused and disoriented, and if the tactile and auditory stimuli continued, in all probability panicky. A fundamental reworking of how I understand the world would be indispensable to account for an invisible cat. Now suppose that the next time I heard guitar music, I failed to perceive a soft brushing sensation around my ankles. It would not bother me a bit. But for Carol Crane, a guitar that didnt affect her ankles might provoke the same sort of confusion and concern an invisible cat would induce in me. To Crane, the ankle-brushing sensation has always been an intrinsical part of guitar music, just as violins always act upon her face and trumpets on the back of her neck. Crane has a rare condition called synesthesia, in which a stimulus usually perceived in one receptive modality produces a sensation in one or more other sensory modalities. (1). Synesthesia has many forms synesthetes may taste shapes or feel odors, for instance, or perceive alphanumeric characters in particular colors. synaesthetic perceptions a re involuntary and are reliably trigge departure by the phenomena that induce them. They are also consistent over time for a given synesthete that is, a true synesthete for whom the musical note E produces a percept of red triangles on a field of yellow will invariably experience that sound that way.