Scientists see synesthetes not as people with disabilities, but as something like supermen, showing us the true capabilities of the brain.
There are people who, at the physiological level, perceive what is happening around them more subtly and deeper than others. They sense smells and tastes that are inaccessible to us, the gray and the poor. Emotions and sounds have a color "aura" for them. Some may even feel pain or pleasure experienced by others.
Michael Banissi from Goldsmiths College (UK) and his colleagues drew attention to the fact that, on average, there are one or two people in a hundred who at least once in their life (usually in childhood) experienced what is called mirror-touch synesthesia. At the same time, it was pain that caused the strongest sensations. “I hate it when my husband watches violent films,” admitted one of the survey participants. And another subject asked the experimenter not to touch the glass of ice with him.
Do you find it difficult to imagine what it would be like when your fingers, hands feel what the corresponding parts of the body of the person you are observing feel? And synesthetes just as well cannot imagine how "normal" people live. On the one hand, they like to look at people who hug and kiss, but sometimes other people's experiences overwhelm them. “I constantly have to remind myself that these are not my feelings,” complains one of the synesthetes.
The most interesting thing is that we are all to some extent mirrored tactile synesthetes. A functional brain scan of people who watched specially selected video materials at that time showed the activation of parts of the brain responsible for tactile sensations where people touched on the screen in all participants in the experiment. Only in synesthetes did this empathic system become overexcited and reached the threshold beyond which a person began to feel as if they had just touched him.
The mechanism of this phenomenon is completely incomprehensible. Mr. Banissi suggests that the problem is in the malfunctioning of the system, thanks to which we distinguish ourselves from others. It is not surprising that synesthesia is inherent in all people, because in order to understand that someone is angry or sad, we imagine ourselves in his place. But at the same time we remember that this is a different person.
And synesthetes feel as if they are not looking at the other, but in the mirror in which they see themselves. And then the substitution becomes even more complete - synesthetes do not just model what they think another person can feel in a given situation, but they guess exactly what he really feels.
Indeed, in subsequent studies that Mr. Banissi conducted together with Jamie Ward from the University of Sussex (UK), it turned out that mirror tactile synesthetes tend to better understand the affects of other people and more accurately recognize emotions from facial expressions.
Promotional video:
In their experiments, they outperformed the control group when they looked at pictures of people smiling, worried, frowning, puzzled, or simply making faces. And the point here is not at all that synesthetes are experts on faces: when it was necessary to remember what kind of famous person is depicted in the photograph, they showed the same results as the control group.
As you can see, synesthetes do not hallucinate, but really understand others better. Maybe this is not a disease or a deviation, but in some sense a normal result of socialization? And then it turns out that they, as well as people who are especially keenly aware of tastes and smells, who have a phenomenal memory for faces, etc., involuntarily demonstrate to us the true capabilities of a person.
Probably, Mr. Banissi concludes, studying people with extraordinary abilities is worth not only for the sake of understanding abnormalities in the brain, but also in order to develop methods and exercises that will allow us, thick-skinned and silly, to become a little more attentive and sensitive.