It's called synaesthesia.

I have a close friend who has a fairly strong form of it, numbers as colours, all that. Listening to her describe it has made me realize we have far more senses than the traditional five, or seven, or whatever the official number is these days. I'm starting to think it's wrong to think of senses as discrete experiences at all.

Many sensory experiences trigger strong feelings/memories of space and, how should I put it, self-presence and time in me, which I suspect is similar to how a synaesthete would "conflate" sound and sight. The brain forms associations in a pretty wild fashion, and sometimes those associations cross the boundaries of the traditionally separated senses. I'm not sure it makes sense to consider the times those boundaries are crossed more special than the times they are not, though.

It sounds like (from around 2:00 ish) that she has a bit of synaesthesia too.

I can't even prove that the color blue I am seeing is the same for you as it is me, proof is hard


It's very possible it isn't the same for me, at least at some level. There's quite a range in terms of color perception (with outliers like color blind people or those who experience synaesthesia) and it's clear that to a certain extent color discrimination varies between cultures and sexes.

Disregarding those differences, it's likely there is at least some commonality between our perceptions. Assuming you believe our experiences are rooted in our brains, it seems likely that the structures for perceiving color would be generally similar. As our understanding of the brain grows, we'll be able to nail this question down much better.

In any case, though, just because one thing (which may not even be a true thing) that sounds simple (our experience of seeing color) is hard to prove a point about, that doesn't mean that in general proof is hard. We evaluate evidence a million times a day in order to guide decisions and actions, and over time science has come up with a tremendous amount of evidence for very complicated and sometimes unintuitive propositions. Now clearly "absolute proof" is usually hard, and probably impossible for most useful subjects - but proof (in the looser sense of sufficient evidence to believe) is all around us, and the basis for almost everything we do.

It's possible this is like the physical diffrences in brains that stop people beng able to perceive faces, or objects, or movement.. all different parts of the brain process these and are separate constructs.

could it be a problem of pitch recognition i wonder? as tiny hairs in our ears pick up the frequencies, but then the transmission of those through neurons could be disorganized somehow.
though perhaps there are a range of different problems that can cause amusia with different effects on the perception of sound...

imagine having this in conjunction with synaesthesia..!

I'm not a huge Alanis fan, and yeah, she misses the definition of "ironic" several times over. But I love this video because I know that weather, that lowering winter light, that salt-scarred car, and those colourful wool clothes. I can smell that damn car, too, with its mixture of old cigarette smoke and that dank underground garage odour.

So call this submission a combo of nostalgia and synaesthesia. Proust had his madeleines, I have Alanis.

(And thanks to firefly for this video, which reminded me to look for this one.)