Fun with brains

Now I think I can say with some fair degree of certainty that we all look at the world in slightly different ways. I'm equally sure that from time to time we have all wondered what it would be like to experience the world the way someone else does. This usually leads to stupid questions like "Do other people see the same colour when we both look at red?". Think about that for a second, we know what wavelength we are looking at but do our brains interpret it the same way?

Well it turns out that a lot of people "see" more than just the colour they see. These people have a condition know as synaesthesia. Some of you may have heard of this before, it's a really neat neurological condition. What happens is that inputs (usually visual or auditory) into the brain trigger more than one reaction. People might see specific colours associated with specific letters, numbers or words; others may experience a taste for words they hear. There are all kinds of variations on this theme and they have been known and research for years. It turns out that more recently they have found that there is another form of synaesthesia, this one being more conceptual. Essentially those who experience it associate abstract qualities, such as gender or personalities to things like words, letters, numbers or colours.

So why am I telling you all this? Well it turns out that if you included this new definition of synaesthesia the prevalence of the condition in society goes from somewhere around 1 in thousands to 1 in 20. But that wouldn't be quite enough to make me want to write about it, unless I had the condition; but I don't I'm quite normal and experience the world in the same mundane way that most people do. Deirdre however...

We figured out that Deirdre is synaesthetic when I read an article about it in New Scientist. After learning about the higher prevalence we had the following exchange:

Me: So do you happen to see colours when you look at letters or numbers.
D: No. But they do have genders. (All this was said in a very matter of fact tone.)
Me: Really! That's so cool! You have synaesthesia. What gender is blue?
D: Well blue is androgynous.

We proceeded to go through a list of letters, numbers and colours, all of which I have forgotten the genders for (though it seems I usually pick ones that are male). Then I learned something else really neat about Deirdre, she sees the words she hears!

Of course this led to a new barrage of questions from me. I learned that:

• The words go by in her mind's eye in a ticker tape style
• The spelling is always correct
• As is the punctuation
• Stuttering slows the tape down
• The letters are in white on a blue background
• Other known languages are written in that language
• She can see what she is about to say and sometimes gets ahead of her own mouth

So of course being the complete nerd that I am I have proceeded to harass one of her sisters and two of her brothers about the condition. So far it seems that the condition only afflicts the females of the family and the only commonality is the ticker tape. Of course I will pursue this line of research until it no longer amuses me, though so far the novelty has yet to fade and with eight more siblings to go... I'll keep you all posted.