Synesthesia: Augmented Reality

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When humans are young, and their minds are as impressionable as a memory foam mattress, they are taught that green is a color, a square is a shape, and that twenty two is a number. It is not until later in life that humans start to apply these things into their everyday lives and begin to
describe the stimuli they encounter on the street, in their house, and at school.

Some children learn that the way they have perceived those arbitrary learned things that humans call shapes, numbers, and colors is different from the way that their classmates and friends recognize them. Some see colors, but also taste them. Some taste food and get a tactile sensation similar to holding an object. Some read a book and each word and each written letter provides them with a different colored sensation. Scientists call this phenomenon Synesthesia, and it helps create a myriad of questions like “How do I know I see red the same way you see red? What if what you call red is what I call green?”(Cytowic vii). Perhaps the ongoing research into this mysterious condition can shed some light on the human perception of reality.

Something that is Synesthetic is often thought of as something that evokes many senses at once, and while this definition is not entirely false it is often used to describe poetry or music, giving a superficial face to this exciting form of reality perception. Many people fail to realize that this is a variance -a mutation- in DNA, a subtle one, but a variance none the less, that causes individuals to perceive stimuli in duality. These people (synesthetes as they are called) do not substitute one sensation for another, rather they experience both senses in conjunction with one another due to a blending of their brains’ processes. A Synesthete’s world is augmented beyond anything that Non-Synesthetes (those without synesthesia) can ever truly understand through any form of research (vii, 6).

Researchers have come up with several theories on the cause of synesthesia and have come up with a widely accepted theory called the disconnection theory, a theory that proposes that the limbic system in the brain (the center of things such as motor control, olfactory processes, and higher thinking) gets disconnected from the rest of the brain. This disconnection allows other parts of the brain, otherwise restricted to communicating through the limbic system, to let their impulses out freely. These impulses are perceived by the human consciousness as synesthesia (Tager-Flusberg 498).