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slipfast
Lol, it was really funny more than anything, don't worry.
trivia: Muad'dib
nichety entry below. works cited because I can feel the ghosts of my professors haunting me and you wanted additional reading material.
I chose a niche form of synesthesia-- people may be aware of synesthesia in general, but rarely know all the possible types, what differentiates them, or have even heard of this one in general. This includes even my professors and a visiting lecturer when I was in college; they didn't know more than a brief overview of it. People are studying this increasingly more nowadays and are linking "mirror neurons", something I'll go into below, to more and more things. Just the other day I read about misophonia, a condition where someone has specific sounds that they have a disproportionate response of anger or distress towards whenever they hear them, possibly being related to this type of synesthesia or having similar causes.
I think it's really cool to learn about and already had a lot of information about it saved to my laptop from studying it in college for a senior seminar, though I had to rewrite the overview/lecture because my documents folder was lost to a hard drive malfunction years ago. Which is what I was supposed to do anyway, so it's fine, but that's probably why it sounds like an academic presentation! More people should learn about this and if asked for a niche topic it's inevitably the first one I'll reach for since it was my academic niche for a semester.
Synesthesia is a phenomenon where experiencing something with one sense leads to experiencing it with another as well. Common examples of this are hearing music as colour, seeing letters or phonemes or words as colours, seeing numerical sequences spatially, or tasting spoken words. It affects at least percent of the population, despite being commonly thought to be much rarer. In one particular kind of synesthesia, commonly known as mirror-touch synesthesia, a synesthete experiences the physical (and sometimes emotional) sensations of anyone they’re looking at (Gray and Simner).
“I can feel others’ pain, not metaphorically, but literally,” says one mirror-touch synesthete (Rathi). Though of course it’s not just pain. Any sensation a synesthete watches someone else experience, they’ll have mirrored on their own body. This can include (but isn’t limited to) the pressure of a tap on the cheek, cold fingertips when someone else is touching ice, gentle tickling, pleasure from watching someone be kissed, or the warmth of a hug. “It was like a warm rush up the spine and just constricted the shoulder area here, like this,” another synesthete describes as her experience of watching someone else be hugged (NPR).
Intensely painful sensations can overwhelm a synesthete, causing reactions that might not be expected from merely mirroring sensation alone. The above-quoted synetheste watched a little boy hit his head and felt her vision go blurry, her head hurting so badly she was reduced to crawling (NPR). Another synesthete, who works at a hospital, experiences everything he does to his patients and can typically deal with the feelings (such as a needle going into his spine from performing a spinal tap, or an IV getting put in) if he expects them, but was taken by surprise by a scene in a horror movie where a woman got her neck broken. He felt not only the sensation of his neck twisting around backwards, but like his spine was cracking, and he had trouble breathing, despite nothing having actually happened to him, and him never actually having felt those sensations himself to know what they should be like. It can become easily overwhelming to be in a crowd, or even around people at all, when one feels everything they see. They’ll feel perceived pain or sensation, even if they don’t know for sure that the person they’re mirroring could feel it at all (Hayasaki).
Not all synesthetes do feel pain or sensation that strongly, however. While it’s often a mirror copy of what they’re seeing, it can also be mere twinges; an awareness of the pain without actually viscerally experiencing it. Rarely, all sensation is felt in the same place on a synesthete’s body without it mattering where the person they’re mirroring is experiencing it (Chun and Hupé). Mostly, though, there are two types of mirror-touch synesthetes. With the first type, about 20% of recorded synesthetes, watching someone be touched on the left cheek elicits a tactile sensation on their own left cheek. The rest feel it on their right cheek instead, since it’d look like the person they were looking at was feeling on the right side from their perception (Banissy and Ward).
It isn’t merely humans that these synesthetes mirror sensation of—not in all cases, anyway. One reports having felt the flight of a dragonfly and birds (Rathi). Anecdotal evidence from a study reveals that there are occasional object-tactile associations; almost 20% of individuals felt some sort of tactile sensation when they saw a lamp being touched in a preceding study, and in this one participants reported experiencing tactile sensation when they saw someone touching their personal belongings. Though mirror-touch synesthetes can generalise their experiences to what they see on strangers and fictional characters, and even mannequins, it’s often stronger with people they feel close to or at least real people (Chun and Hupé).
Nor is it solely physical sensation, since the doctor can feel himself getting worked up when psychotic patients enter rage states in front of him (Hayasaki), and mirror-touch synesthetes are often incredibly empathic (Banissy and Ward). They outperformed a control group on tests of recognising facial expressions and the associated emotions, as well, though they are in fact worse at recognising and remembering faces alone (Banissy et al).
True synesthetes have this condition from birth. They may not even realise that it’s abnormal, especially since, as a genetic condition, it tends to run in families (NPR). It also tends to co-occur with other types of synesthesia (Chun and Hupé). However, such a phenomenon may also be present in amputees who feel like they still possess a phantom limb. A study was conducted by Vilayanur Ramachandran, testing to see what volunteers felt when they saw other people’s hands touched where they felt their own phantom arms were. Much like mirror-touch synesthetes, the amputees reported vivid and precisely localised tactile sensations (Rathi).
There are two main theories as to how mirror-touch synesthesia comes about. The threshold theory is based on the concept of mirror neurons, which are a type of brain cell that activates both when we do something and when we see someone else doing something. This relates to both emotion and tactile sensation or action. A study by Christian Keysers found that a particular area of the somatosensory cortext lit up when participants were touched on the leg with a feather-duster and when they saw pictures of someone else being touched in the same way (Winerman). In fact, it’s called mirror-touch instead of vision-touch because of those mirror neurons, which were found initially in monkey prefrontal cortexes but have been hypothesised to exist in humans as well, with such studies supporting that hypothesis (Gray and Simner).
Banissy, one of the leading researchers in this field, used functional imaging to look at mirror-touch synesthetes’ brains, comparing them to those of non-synesthetes. They saw that when synesthetes saw someone else being touched, the part of their brains that reacts to tactile sensation—“including primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, premotor regions, and the superior temporal sulcus”-- is hyper-activated, far more than a non-synesthete’s brain. Their brains may activate the system past a threshold in order to turn it into a conscious experience, inducing tactile sensation in them as well.
The other theory is the Self-Other Theory. According to it, mirror-touch synesthetes have a high level of difficulty in distinguishing themselves from other people for the basis of experiences. They’re so empathic they aren’t able to tell the difference between what someone else is feeling and what is experienced with their own bodies (Meier et al). Mirror-touch synesthetes have a lower level of gray matter in the temporoparietal junction, which is the major reason used in distinguishing self from other. Combining this with empathy makes it seem like in some ways this barrier between self and other has dissolved (NPR).
Works Cited
- Acharya, Sourya, and Samarth Shukla. "Mirror Neurons: Enigma of the Metaphysical Modular Brain." Journal of Natural Science, Biology and Medicine J Nat Sc Biol Med 3.2 (2012): 118. Web.
- Banissy, Michael J., and Jamie Ward. "Mechanisms of Self-other Representations and Vicarious Experiences of Touch in Mirror-touch Synesthesia." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7 (2013): n. pag. Web.
- Banissy, Michael J., and Jamie Ward. "Mirror-touch Synesthesia Is Linked with Empathy." Nature Neuroscience Nat Neurosci 10.7 (2007): 815-16. Web.
- Banissy, Michael J., Lúcia Garrido, Flor Kusnir, Bradley Duchaine, Vincent Walsh, and Jamie Ward. "Superior Facial Expression, But Not Identity Recognition, in Mirror-Touch Synesthesia." The Journal of Neuroscience 31.5 (2011): 1820-824. Print.
- Chun, Charlotte A., and Jean-Michel Hupé. "Mirror-touch and Ticker Tape Experiences in Synesthesia." Frontiers in Psychology Front. Psychol. 4 (2013): n. pag. Web.
- Gray, Brian F., and Julia Simner. "Synesthesia and Release Phenomena in Sensory and Motor Grounding. Cases of Disinhibited Embodiment?" Frontiers in Psychology Front. Psychol. 6 (2015): n. pag. Web.
- Hayasaki, Erika. "This Doctor Knows Exactly How You Feel." Pacific Standard. Pacific Standard, n.d. Web. 03 Dec. 2015. <http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/is-mirror-touch-synesthesia-a-superpower-or-a-curse>.
- Meier, Beat, Katrin Lunke, and Nicolas Rothen. "How Mirror-touch Informs Theories of Synesthesia." Cognitive Neuroscience 6.2-3 (2015): 142-44. Web.
- Rathi, Akshat. "Http://www.contributoria.com/issue/2014-03/52dcab12f5c53ae2670000e0/." Contributoria. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Dec. 2015. <http://www.contributoria.com/issue/2014-03/52dcab12f5c53ae2670000e0/>.
- Spiegel, Alix, and Lulu Miller. "Mirror Touch." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 03 Dec. 2015. <http://www.npr.org/2015/01/30/382453493/mirror-touch>.
- Winerman, Lea. "The Mind's Mirror." American Psychological Association. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Dec. 2015. <http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror.aspx>.
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