It's Not An Acid Trip, Just Synaesthesia

A lovely dinner conversation about medical procedures involving the poking and cutting of eyeballs got me thinking today about two science articles I've read in the past few weeks, both dealing with interesting things visible to the naked eye. The first is the accidental discovery by Yale researchers that quantum entanglement effects can take place on a size scale normally reserved for the traditional model of physics and be visible. Here's the article from Wired. If you've never heard of quantum entanglement before, it's a phenomenon that occurs when the quantum states of any two or more separate objects reach parity to the extent that they can not be distinguished as separate anymore, regardless of how much space is between them. It sounds like sci-fi dreamstuff and an unimportant curiosity, but actually, understanding and harnessing this effect will culminate in the next giant leap for mankind's informational technologies, the quantum computer. Once we invent one of those, hello technological singularity and the ensuing cyborg carnage!

The next and, in my opinion, more interesting article came courtesy of the BBC and is about time-space synaesthesia. What the hell is that, you ask? Synaesthesia, a.k.a. the most awesome of all neurological disorders, is a condition where the left and right lobes of our brain have an unusually high number of physical connections, resulting in--and here comes the wonderfully bizarre part--any one stimulation of a sensory or cognitive pathway receiving signals from a corresponding pathway on the other side of the brain. Synaesthetes (people with the condition) report widely varied experiences, but just to give you a basic example of what this entails imagine seeing a number, now imagine that number being inextricably linked with a color. Five is green, eight is blue, two is brown and so forth. This can happen with days as well. Wednesday is orange, for example. This is how a grapheme synaesthete sees the world.

There are multiple types of synaesthesia, all with exotic, mind-bending shifts in perception. One type can be triggered by LSD and psylocybin; drop a tab and "see" the music. Others can think of numbers or mathematical formulas and have them appear to hover in the air before them like a heads-up display. There's even a type, gustatory synaesthesia, that associate phonemes with tastes. Imagine hearing the word "doctor" and tasting a hamburger, or "sunset" and getting a mouth full of lemons. Maybe if a word triggered a bad taste this type of synaesthesia could be considered a bad thing, but other than that I can't say any of these conditions could be reasonably called detrimental.

The kind of synaesthesia this BBC article describes, the time-space variety, doesn't mean one can see through time or detect black holes or anything like that, it means that the cognitive concept of time becomes a visual phenomena. These synaesthetes perceive the calendar as an irregularly shaped torus or track along which they can move and see scheduled engagements. These people don't need a PDA to keep track of their lives, they just look around.

I for one think synaesthesia is a damn interesting neurological condition. I just had the thought that if I had a choice to undergo an elective surgery that could create more connection between my left and right brain I would do it in a heartbeat. Especially if I got gustatory synaesthesia, I'm thinking I could eat raw brussel sprouts and just say a magic word to make it taste instead like a Chicago deep dish pizza. And that, folks, is the most petty use of science imaginable.

--Matt