Synesthesia

1. Has it ever occurred to you to be unable to concentrate while reading something, because of some noise which is distracting you? If you were trying to listen to some audio lecture for example, it would be logical to assume that it would have been impossible to listen if there was noise. But why a noise distracts the eyes when we read a book?

2. This is an example of synesthesia- It seems that all our senses need to cooperate in order that we are able to perceive something. Not only a loud sound, but also a bad smell or taste can distract attention.

3. Formally, synesthesia is defined as a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme-color synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored (previous picture). Another example is spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, where numbers, months of the year, or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be ‘farther away’ than 1990), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise). Synesthetic associations can occur in any combination and any number of senses or cognitive pathways. Little is known about how synesthesia develops. It has been suggested that synesthesia develops during childhood when children are intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time. [1]

4. Synesthesia, as a form of ‘supersense,’ is similar to extra-sensory perception (ESP). While the mechanism is unknown, it seems that such an ability is lost after childhood. Is this because of some problem of our educational system (which is largely based on logic instead of intuition)? Or is it just because as we grow up such ‘childish whims’ go away? Could there be a way for us to cultivate and preserve such abilities for all our life?

5. I was thinking that not only perception but also conception is based on the cooperation of the senses. In the previous example, one cannot read a book if there is noise. But can one think at all if there is no sense present? Can intelligence exist without the senses? Such a cooperation between the senses and the mind is what I call superception (while it is also commonly known as ideasthesia).

6. Imagine that the whole human being is like a sphere of energy (although we perceive ourselves materialistically, having a body, for some reason). This sphere can be identified with the soul. All stimuli from the environment enter this sphere, which oscillates. Such oscillations are what we commonly refer to as the senses (therefore there could be an infinite number of senses). All information in the external environment has the form of oscillations, creating interference patterns. Our vibrating soul then fine tunes with such oscillations, so that we perceive something (thus such an oscillating energetic sphere includes our whole existence, both the mind and the soul, as well as our manifested part which we perceive as a body).

7. In fact we may include all possible ‘ideas,’ or notions, into perception. By extension, additionally, we may say that the mind includes the psyche if we confine the psyche to the emotional sphere. Thus ‘perception’ is the outline of a sphere which includes the whole human entity, and upon the surface of such a sphere all experience takes place. In such a sense we may say that ideas or notions are kinds of higher senses, experienced mentally instead of emotionally.

8. I will avoid delving into more details (and perhaps I wouldn’t have much more to say). Kirlian photography is an example of how we could find proof for the existence of the human aura (which is part of our soul). Presumably if we were perfect beings then we would perceive our whole existence mentally- we might say that we could touch not only the objects which we perceive to be solid, but also the ‘objects’ (like photons) which are invisible to us at the current stage of our evolution or state of existence.

9. The point I want to make is that we had better treat the human entity (ourselves) as a unity, whose aspects- the body, the senses and the mind have to work together and at the same time, so that experience (any perception) can be established.

10. Here is a series of thoughts:

- Perception is the result of the senses.

- The world is composed of objects.

- The objects are perceived by the senses.

- Everything we know is found in our mind.

- Thus both the material world (the objects) and the mental world (perception) fundamentally consist of the same properties.

- Deep inside what exists and what we see to exist are one and the same.

11. Have you ever thought that, solving for example a mathematical problem, your hands manipulate the symbols and functions which you have in mind? That perhaps your hands describe in this way their own function? But the function or action which our hands perform is the same action which propagates all across the universe, expressed by some corresponding physical field. In fact each part of our body or any kind of object can be seen as the manifested aspect of corresponding actions which penetrate the universe. If one pays attention only to one’s hand moving- not also to the reason which made them move- then one neglects the unity.

12. If there really is a unified aspect of the senses, so that fundamentally the senses are nothing more than the way we perceive the different vibrating modes of our own psyche, one may expect that, under some circumstances, different senses can be ‘mixed up,’ in the same way the wave patterns of oscillations can be superposed, so that, for example, a smell may correspond to a certain color, a sound to a certain emotion, a color to a certain shape, a certain emotion to a certain notion, and so on- thus synesthesia.

13. In primitive societies premonitions and misconceptions were prevailing (the Galileo affair for example took place just 500 years ago). Technology has made our lives easier and more practical, but has taken away our contact with nature and the pleasures of living a naive and simple life. Is it however about time we used technology to rediscover our most extraordinary natural capabilities? Unfortunately modern science is still too materialistic (matter is for modern science what God used to be for the Holy Inquisition). But if we abandon the mechanistic model of the universe, new ‘dimensions’ in ‘spacetime’ will appear.

14. It is very hard, even inconceivable, what ‘physics’ of the future would look like, whether human beings at that stage would have been transformed into ‘cyborgs’ or, even further in the future, into ‘energy spheres,’ moving across the universe without physical or mental barriers. In such an imaginary future, hopefully, synesthetes will not be considered ‘psychic,’ or ‘freaks of nature,’ because all people will be such. Incidentally, on the contrary to what most people believe right now, the future of civilization is not artificial technology, but the integration with our own mind.

15. Why do we hold our head when we want to concentrate? Isn’t whatever we know an aspect of Consciousness?

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia]

10/4/2018

Image: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia]