Do you see what they see?

from: DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY SEE?- Discovery Magazine (reprinted on Sirs)- Brad Lemley

The article focuses more on what synesthesia is/ what we have come to understand it as being and a lot of people with specific experiences with synesthesia along with the progress that's been made in researching it-- it's a long article. One of the researchers actually has synesthesia so it must be exciting for her to find all these new things about her condition and having the condition must also give her some sort of direction to take for her research. Not only that, but she has graphene color synesthesia as well as sound- touch synesthesia-- she's a double synesthete! I wonder what happens when she listens to music as she reads or writes, wouldn't that get over whelming? The music plus the sensations brought on by the music plus the reading plus the colors in what she reads- whoa.

One part that particularly stood out for me was: "We tend to assume that reality is the same for everybody," says Peter Grossenbacher, a senior fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who is widely regarded as the leading American synesthesia researcher. "Synesthesia shows us that it isn't. People all around us may have a very different experience of the world."

It kind of brings forth that same question we all ask ourselves at some point: is the red I see the same red you see? only this time the question is more existential.