The Yogi and The Hypnotist Episode 11: Synesthesia

John and Jennifer discuss synesthesia, a condition where senses overlap. They share their personal experiences with synesthesia, including using sensory associations to aid in learning and memory. They also discuss how synesthesia can be utilized in hypnosis and mnemonic devices. Overall, they highlight the benefits of incorporating sensory experiences to enhance learning and recall. Welcome to the Yogi and the Hypnosis Podcast, where neuroscience meets mindfulness. I'm John Ferrante, meditation teacher and yogi. I'm Jennifer Ferrante, clinical witness therapist and neuro-linguistic programming practitioner. Together, we will blend modern cognitive science, Jungian psychology, and timeless spiritual wisdom with practice. If you enjoy the show, please hit that follow button to be notified of upcoming episodes. Hello, welcome to the Yogi and the Hypnotist. I'm John. And I'm Jennifer. And we are here today to talk about synesthesia. We are right in the middle of a thunderstorm, so if you can hear that in the background, hopefully that's a soothing sound to you. Yes, it sounds great from here, but of course we may get some tornado warnings, some horns, at which point we may have to cut the podcast short or finish this conversation later. But thank you for joining us. This is a really interesting topic and something that I first learned about probably in college. I was assigned a video project by one of my instructors, Adam Brown, and he gave us this prompt of synesthesia. So trying to create a video, this was an art piece that would allow you to feel maybe what it's like to have synesthesia. And so we were creating videos maybe that you could taste or smell, so something that you see but your other senses also get involved. So I tried to simulate maybe what it would look like to taste, say, like a lemon-lime beverage, like Sprite or 7-Up, some kind of effervescent, bubbly lime beverage. So that was my first exposure to synesthesia. It's come up recently. Jennifer has been researching it, and she has some experience with it as well. Can you talk a little bit about how you first discovered synesthesia? Well, I'm not sure how I originally heard about it. One of the first ways that I worked with it without really knowing much about the concept at the time was when I was working with my daughter and then after that with other students that had dyslexia. So there's a program called the Davis Method, and I went through that with my oldest daughter and my fourth-born daughter, who both displayed attributes of dyslexia. And so in the Davis Method, one of the things that it explains about people who are dyslexic is that they're seeing words or letters on a page or numbers with dysgraphia. Actually, I'm not sure. Dysgraphia might be the handwriting one, but dyscalculia is the math form with those letters. So they're seeing these things rotate and spin, and one of the tests that I found interesting for dyslexia is they would have someone picture a cake on their hand and to describe it. And the way that they would describe the cake on their hand would give clues as to whether a person was dyslexic or not. And whether it was rotating, whether the layer they would describe first was the icing or the base, gave a lot of clues as to whether the person was experiencing dyslexia. And one of the tools for training the mind to be able to read more easily was to actually form all of the letters out of clay and to manipulate it to see it from all different angles. So even if it was moving, you could identify it as the letter N, because after building N out of clay and flipping it all different directions and ways, then you get this 3D image that forms in your mind of a rotating N, and any way that it's facing as you're reading, you can identify that as N. But one of the things that was really interesting that they found with people who were dyslexic is they had a much easier time once they could have a picture around a word. So, for example, the word bear, you naturally can think of an image of a bear. But the words that were the hardest for dyslexic students to learn were the sight words that didn't have pictures. So, for example, that. The word that doesn't naturally have a picture that would come to your mind with it. Unlike, maybe nouns would have a picture that you could see. Yeah, these transition words, I guess, would be harder to visualize. And because these two areas of the brain are crossed in someone who has dyslexia, their brain stops there because there's no picture. And for someone who doesn't have dyslexia, we can just see the word on the page, but they're actually seeing an image. And so words that don't have images are much harder for their brain to read and process. And so one of the fascinating things that we were able to do is give pictures to those words. And the way we would do that is through incorporating all the senses. So I would ask my students or my daughter, is the word that, what color is that? Almost all of them said brown. That is brown. Interesting. And I would say, how does that smell? And because it was brown, often they would say mud. It smells like mud. Not all for mud, but most that said brown also said mud. And then I would ask them, how does it make you feel? Like, we'd go through all the senses. And as soon as they had a sense picture of that word, they would always remember that word. So when I would use flashcards with them for the word that, T-H-A-T, I would write it out in a brown color on their flashcard, and we would have little pictures on the card of the things they had associated it with. And we got really fast, and they got really good at reading those words. So that was really the first work that I ever did with synesthesia, but I didn't know at the time what that was. Interesting. I didn't know that that's what we were doing in that process. Right. Yeah. That does seem connected, that certain words would have a color to them that would remind you of different things. And bringing back to memory, I think it was my kindergarten class, but each, as we were learning the letters, they had different characters for each letter. I don't know if you've had this in your school, too, but they were kind of personified. I think I remember seeing them with eyes, and each letter would have a character. Maybe even like they were a pillow, and you could hold it and maybe see it in different directions. I wonder if that also kind of helps kids learn the letters in that way, because they can see it in three dimensions and how it would look from different angles, which maybe your mind would do. Well, and the way that we naturally learn letters with toddlers is through form and shape that we see in the natural world. So often we'll pick up a button and we'll say O, or we'll see the profile of a mom who's pregnant and we'll say B, because it has that curvature to it, or there's all these really creative ways to show letters in nature or in the world. And what that does is it creates a mnemonic device. And synesthesia is highly linked to mnemonic device, which is one of the reasons that it can be kind of a superpower, because those who have synesthesia have shown, UCLA did a study on it and showed that those with synesthesia have higher rates of being able to use mnemonic devices for memory, and they score higher on intelligence tests, because they are able to use sensory association to remember facts that they need to for tests or factory calls. Yeah, that makes sense. There's more sensory input, and that allows your memory to be linked to not just one thing like letters on a page, but gives you like a sound or a smell, maybe even a color, two words. That would make sense to kind of more deeply associate the knowledge that you're learning, making it multisensory. Yeah, I can see that the recall might be much better having more areas that you can link it to. Well, we use this with hypnosis when someone is wanting to remember a part of their life that they don't have memory from. Now, this is not something that's suggested in most situations, but when a situation warrants a regression therapy to be able to remember details, because perhaps maybe it's not a traumatic event. Maybe it's something they really need to remember because it's important information. They had a great memory with their grandmother that's starting to fade, and maybe they want to be able to revisit that in vibrancy or something like that. What we can do to bring some of those memories back and increase and make them stronger is any sensory input from the time we can re-trigger. Because the limbic system, which stores sensory input and emotional input, is also the part that aids in memory storage. The limbic system being triggered connects all of that. We use that with hypnosis, but we can also use it with mnemonic devices. Anytime we want to remember something, we can attach a sensory experience to it, which is why when, say, maybe in a certain period of your life you listen to a certain CD a lot, when that soundtrack is playing, you're right back at that age that that song was a part of your life. Or there's a certain smell you associate with a person, and that smell brings you right back to that memory. I was just thinking that. I was looking through my old effects, and I found a bottle of Drakkar Noir, a fragrance I used to wear in middle school. I brought it home, and I put it on, and Jennifer said, hey, you smell like my dad. Then later that day, the girls smelled me, and said, hey, you smell like granddad. They remembered his smell. They hadn't seen him in many months, and I never noticed that he wore that cologne, but it was very clear in their memory that the smell meant granddad. I thought that was really fascinating. Everybody maybe has a signature fragrance. Some it's perfume or cologne. Some it might be that they always used Irish spring soap. Or cook a certain type of food or something that we associate with their essence, and that's really what sensory input helps us do, is it puts all of these associations onto an input or stimulus. We have a person, and then we create the sensory sensation experience around that person. Then when we experience any part of those sensory experiences, we tap right back into the essence of that person, which is very helpful for certain types of recall or to even extrapolate out a pattern prediction because maybe we notice that every time we see the color blank, this happens. Now we have a point of reference to be able to have faster pattern recognition, which I believe is why that area of intelligent tests are scored so highly for those with synesthesia because in my life, the way that that is played out is it kind of helps me with predicting patterns. I can definitely see that. You're great at pattern recognition, and that is definitely one of your gifts or superpowers, if it were. I am really good at noticing something out of place, some little details, and I guess in some ways that is a pattern, and then noticing a deviation from that pattern. I like things to be in order. I'm not always as organized as I would like to be, but that is one thing that always gets my attention. It may have started my first job when I was 15 years old. I worked at a grocery store, and I used to stock shelves. Whenever you walk into a grocery store, you'll probably notice that it's well run. All the brands are facing outward, and I would do that. It was very satisfying to look down a row of products, and everything was just right in line, and all the brands were facing outward. I remember I did that for my first girlfriend's house. While she was away at work, I reorganized the cabinets, and I had all the brands facing outward, and it really freaked her out. She's like, whoa, all these brands are just facing in. I thought, hey, this is good. I'm organizing them. You can find everything, have the labels facing outward, and so few people do that in their own cupboards, but I guess it's something that I learned from that first job. I just kind of like the aesthetic of everything facing the person. Let's talk about that word for a second that you just used there, aesthetic. Aesthetic has an aspect of synesthesia. Can you hear that root there with aesthetic? Aesthetic is the study of beauty, right, or the beauty of senses. And so the word synesthesia, similar to anesthesia, we have syn meaning together, and sthesia meaning senses, so we have the senses working together. With anesthesia and meaning without senses, we have senses without sensory input. And then aesthetic is actually the study of or the process or being of beauty or the senses. So what you were doing in that moment of making something aesthetically pleasing is you were pleasing your senses by facing everything a certain way. And when your sensory input flags something that is out of order or different, it creates a feeling in your body which prompts you to change it. So right there, you have a visual input creating an emotional feeling in the body and in a small aspect that is synesthesia. I do sometimes feel irritated if things are off, like if you walk into an office and the pictures are askew, it's like, you know, I want to go over there and fix it. It's usually not my place to do so, but I don't want to knock it off the wall or, you know, break something. But that is one thing I'll notice is, yeah, something like slightly askew where you know it's supposed to be level, but it's not. Or, you know, there's five things that are one way and one that's different. You noticed that the other day I had some essential oils lined up and one of them was missing a sticker on top. It had fallen off and I was like, oh, you're missing this one. Like, yeah, I know. I noticed that too. But we're out of orange stickers, so what can you do? There's yellow. We might also be out of yellow stickers. That was the one that didn't have a sticker. Good memory, yeah. That comes through memory. One of the ways that if I were looking at you for synesthesia, I would guess that if two senses paired together, it would be visual and feeling because of that aspect of yourself. There may be more senses that are crossed, and some people with synesthesia only experience a couple being linked and some experience all being linked. It just depends on some experience it at some times and not others. And so for me, those two are very strong as well, where vision is tied to emotion. But for me, I see a vision attached to an emotion instead of you seeing something and feeling an emotion. I feel the emotion first and then see, if that makes sense. It's a backwards process. For example, every time I hug you, I see magenta. So the emotion of comfort, love, whatever I'm experiencing in that hug is, for me, produces the color in my mind of magenta. Not the other way around. If I see the color of magenta, I don't necessarily feel that emotion immediately, but it's something that my brain could associate those two things together, where then perhaps without being consciously aware of it, my subconscious prefers that color because it's associated with positive emotions. Yeah. I see blue, I believe, like when I hug you or when my eyes are closed. It's not as obvious in full daylight, but certainly when I close my eyes, I can kind of tap into that seeing of color. I can see that that's tied to emotion and to that connection or to you. It could be specific to the person, because I don't see that when I hug everyone. So it could be specific to the emotion of romantic love, or it could be specific to you and what kind of feels like you to me. Whereas blue might feel like me to you. Magenta is a color that's very warm. It's associated with love. So it could be that love emotion, whereas blue is typically associated with cognitive function, thinking, speaking. And it's often used as the color of like universities and things. And so if that is an energetic or an essence that you put off warmth and love, and I put off maybe knowledge or scholarly cognitive, which tends to be what my brain's absorbed in, that could be a very real perception of an action or essence in each of us. Yeah, I can definitely see that. And it reminds me of this book. It was one of my favorite books, and it opened my eyes to maybe multi-century experience that there might be this whole unseen world beyond the material world, what can normally be seen maybe with the body's eyes. You may be able to see with, say, the third eye or that sixth eye. Yeah, and the book is called Hands of Light by Barbara Brennan. It may also be the sequel to that book, which was Light Emerging. There's some illustrations in that book that show these fields of energy that surround the body, and they often have different colors. Maybe each layer of this field has a different color associated with it, and that can be extended to one person or another. Like there's an image of a couple in love, and you can see how their fields begin to merge and kind of change color. So I kind of think maybe that's what's happening when we're seeing those colors in our minds. It's the way that our two fields interact with one another. And they make a beautiful purple. Yeah, so that's a nice visual aid to see. It is the way that she sees it. It's not necessarily the way I see it, but she spoke to an artist and they were able to render these beautiful images of what it might be like to see beyond the physical. And I know Alex Gray has done some really amazing paintings in that way, like seeing all these energy fields that interact between people. Well, and that is something that's really interesting because that is something I noticed with working with dyslexic students as well. There was a general consensus, for example, that the word that is brown. But not everybody smelled that as mud. So there may be some like generally agreed upon. Yes, we perceive this thing as this. And a lot of people with synesthesia experience that. So perhaps that's where we get like the chakra colors or the things that people would describe as an aura of energy and the color that that represents. These may seem like really far out there things and people say, I can't see that. Well, probably not everybody sees it exactly the same, but there's been some sort of consensus among people who can perceive it as enough people see this as this to put it into some kind of language. So I do experience some of that synesthesia whenever I'm doing energy work and scanning the body, but I'm listening with my hands. So I'm feeling for any energy shifts that might be in a particular chakra and listening for some heat or coolness, some energy flowing, some vibration, any stagnancy. And all of those are synesthesia. So there's nothing tangible, nothing palpable, but energetically there is. And so in that non-physical realm, you are able to sense different things. I know my Reiki master, Marie Manuceri, was able to visualize a lot of those colors in the body. And she was able to show us a map of how she sees the chakras. It wasn't exactly the same as how Barbara Brennan described them in her book, but it is possible that there is some type of consensus reality even within the non-physical. I know one color for the heart chakra is green, and I use a lot of green in the healing space, green linens and green blankets. That is the color of the heart. I don't necessarily see the heart as being green. Some even see it as like a rose quartz color. Sometimes I can visualize that or I can visualize green calling to mind the emerald. And I think it's helpful to have these tools. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm seeing it with my eyes. It's kind of an imagining, but more I'm using my hands and my will to direct energy within the body. And so I think I do tap into that multisensory experience whenever I'm doing energy work in particular, very much tapped into that. So I know that you have this probably even to a greater degree than I do, and experience many emotions with seeing certain things or certain smells. They can trigger some pretty strong emotional reactions in you. I'm just curious what that is like for you or what the most powerful triggers are for this synesthesia. Well, there's a lot of things that I've always done that I didn't realize were synesthesia until I started studying it. I read that there's most likely about 150 different types of synesthesia, but they have only been able to identify 138. And so the things that classify as synesthesia are very broad. But some examples that I've read about that I thought, doesn't everybody do that? I just assumed that was something that was everybody experienced. Things like marking the halfway points on different... For example, I would do that when I was walking on sidewalks and you know the cracks in the sidewalks. Well, I would never step on the cracks, which is just a thing you hear anyway, because it's inherent, just you don't step on them. But I would always visually create a grid within those lines. Kind of like a halfway mark and then like a cross T. I would not have thought that that's something associated with synesthesia, but apparently it is. So it's like a spatial synesthesia. So when you see something visually, you fill in other aspects of it, which is something that a dyslexic person does because when they see a letter or a number or an item, it starts to move and they can see what the other sides might look like or things like that. So when your brain fills in the other part of the picture you don't see, that's an aspect of synesthesia, which I didn't realize. Pictures. And I was just picturing the viewfinder of the lens. Many cameras now, they have the rule of thirds marked out in the viewfinder so you can align your subject with one of those crosshairs or lines or the center point. So I can definitely see that I do that too in framing things. I don't want to line it up on one of those markers, either third or half. Exactly. And some of that's trained in, but I think some of it's inherent also. Some other traits that are associated with people who have synesthesia is like perfect pitch, as we were talking about when we were driving. Yeah, and your mom said that you as a baby had perfect pitch. Right. That you could match any pitch that she would sing a tone and you would be able to match it. At what, two years old? No, infant. That's why she was surprised by it because she thought that babies can't do that. She wrote it in a baby book. I'll have to read it again to see if it had an age, but it was very little. And so that was one aspect. That was one trait that was associated with synesthesia. One thing that I used to always do, not usually to be observed, could be considered autistic stemming, I think, but also I kind of feel it's more in the sense or an aspect of synesthesia, is when I listen to music, I kind of play it out on my fingers. Not in public. I won't do it in front of people. I know I'm being observed. But when I listen to music, I have always just kind of done this thing that I'm showing you but I don't know how to explain. But it's like tracing the music in the air, basically, because I visualize it. It's like you're playing a harp or maybe an imaginary keyboard with your hands. Right. But I feel it in my fingers where those notes spatially are. And that's something that I just thought was a weird feeling the music in me kind of a thing, but I was a dancer, too, so my body responding to sound didn't seem like a weird stretch. But I was observed doing that by someone once, and they said, oh, you are definitely on the autism spectrum. It was something that at that point I had kind of thought maybe I was, but, you know, never got diagnosed or anything. So that is also an aspect of synesthesia, and they have a strong correlation between autism, ADHD, dyslexia, sensory sensitivities and synesthesia. Well, I'm noticing that I used to do fingering for my trumpet and had three valves, and I would be playing through the music, and in marching band you have to memorize the whole basically show, which could be one or three songs. So I would play through them, and I guess that is a stim. Well, that's muscle memory, but also a stim, yes. So if it's very comforting to do those repetitive patterns that you've learned, that would be stimming for sure. If it's something that you haven't learned, feel or sense those music waves, that would be more associated with the senses, whereas yours is probably trained muscle memory, but with a soothing trained muscle memory. So it's like a stimming. Yes, because it's familiar, and it's a pattern. So like doing scales with my fingers or something. I had a horn in my hand, but I don't. Sure. I guess I also felt that in music, like an ecstatic dance or like improvisational dance where you're letting the music move your body in some way. Most dancers, I think, incorporate an element of synesthesia, and I do think that everybody in some ways experiences synesthesia. I don't think that it's just one segment of the population, although they say it's relatively rare. I think it's 4% that would be classified as having synesthesia. So I think to actually have that classification, you have to have it expand over multiple senses, and it probably needs to play out in your daily life to a point where it's your normal experience, but I do think everybody probably sometimes experiences it. Typically, people who have synesthesia go into arts professions. They like writing. They're very creative, mostly because of this crossover of these clusters of diagnoses and traits. So we know that synesthesia is higher in individuals that are neurodivergent, but we also have studies that show that individuals who are neurodivergent don't experience neural pruning like neurotypicals do. So when they were trying to figure out what is causing these high rates now, I mean high rates being that we're not considered typical yet, but still it feels like what was at one point very divergent is now pretty prevalent. Some of these overlapping traits with neurodivergence and synesthesia is this aspect of neural pruning. So when we went on our break, I had a thought that I guessed probably infants experience full synesthesia, and I wanted to Google it to see if that was accurate because I thought of ADHD, autism, sensory disorders, and dyslexia, the studies that have shown that neural pruning doesn't happen when it normally begins to in childhood development with neurotypicals. And so if we're not pruning these open tabs, basically, like if you think of what's running in your mind as like these open tabs, a neurotypical person will prune the unnecessary tabs, like can ignore the white noise to be able to really focus on what they're doing, or whatever is unnecessary kind of fades, so they are less tuned into their full sensory environments around them. Those who don't have that pruning happening are tuned into their full sensory environment most of the time. So it would make sense then that that's something that when that process happens naturally in childhood, if that doesn't happen for neurodivergent individuals, they probably retain their synesthesia experience in the same way that an infant would have full range of sense, and that would all be interconnected in their mind, not sorted into separate sensory experience. I was just daydreaming and realizing that I am probably on the spectrum. I was just thinking about all the things that you have to tune out, and how there's like raindrops on the window now. I was just thinking of how every light may have like a certain frequency or above that comes with it, and remembering in my office they actually removed all the fluorescent tubes so that, because I didn't have a light switch in my office, it was linked to another office, so I just took all the lights out so that I can control the lighting with lamps and things, but I think that made me pretty neuroatypical. I also did away with my office chair and sat on a giant rubber ball to Pilates or yoga ball, and so I was just thinking of all the things that made me pretty weird. Well, I think that there's a statement or a saying within autistic circles that if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person, and so because it's a spectrum, because all of these are a spectrum, not one presentation is exactly like another, so it's very hard sometimes to even feel like you fit even within this set of what would somebody consider neurotypical versus neurodivergent. It's a real blurred line, and now it's hard to find someone who is entirely neurotypical, and I think some of the reasons for that is some mutation that's happening. They know that there are more neurons present in neurodivergent individuals than there are in neurotypical, and so when that neuron pruning doesn't happen, there's a retention of neurons. So these could be viewed as mutations, and it's becoming more and more prevalent in really rapid numbers that we're seeing jump. So I do think our future holds a reclassification, at least in titling in terms of labels. I don't think neurodivergence will be seen as divergent or even as a disorder. I think it will be seen as a brain wiring, and we'll be more aware of the multiple different types of brain wiring and how to work with it more so that we can function in our environment better, and that was kind of a picture that I was seeing this morning. I was thinking of the different soil environments for different plants and how if a raspberry bush needs acidic soil to grow, that another plant would die immediately when put into acidic soil. If you put someone who is divergent from the general accepted public into a soil that is created for the general public, it may look like a disorder and an inability to thrive or failure to thrive, but within the right environment and the right soil, all of these wirings can be superpowers, like we're talking about here with synesthesia. When used in really fascinating ways, synesthesia can be a really, really positive experience. We know it helps with memory. We know it helps with heightened intelligence tests and many other things, particularly in the arts, having these overlapping sensory experiences create a really vivid and creative atmosphere and environment. So I think we're going to view these types of things so differently in the next five to ten years that we won't even be having some of the conversations we're having right now. I can imagine most artists of the past were also synesthetes, because they're combining multi-disciplines and seeing in a way that most people don't see, creating these really original works of art that others wouldn't see or wouldn't want to create, per se. If you think about when you are able to overlap senses and make connections between sensory input, if you can take that process and extrapolate it out over many body processes, now you have a person who's able to interconnect things that other people aren't making connections between. And so you have these really innovative thinkers who are taking perhaps a design that was meant for one purpose and implementing it in a totally different field to have that crossover effect that's happening between the sensory perception and synesthesia. So it sounds like there's quite a spectrum of synesthesia and different types and presentations of this. It sounds like we all maybe have some of it, and maybe all as infants or babies had much more of this blending of senses together, and now most people, they tend to differentiate into the five senses. But certainly there's people with the sixth sense, and that may be universal as well, but it's harder to really put a pin in and nail down. So I see that you also have a lot of that sixth sense, and perhaps it's because of your blending of senses or the ability to recognize patterns in individuals. But what kind of information have you gleaned from this sense? Are you able to read people's emotions, say, or notice when something's off, someone's upset? Right, which is something that we originally probably would just call empathy or high sensitivity, HSP-type sensitivity. But the more that I was studying synesthesia, the more I realized this isn't also an aspect of synesthesia because involved with synesthesia are mirror neurons. And so when you're observing another person and say their face shifts, so if I'm observing you and I notice maybe your eyes dilate or I notice your face drops or all these little visual cues, I'm seeing a visual sight and I'm feeling an emotion. So these are two senses happening at the same time concurrently. What that has allowed me to do is I can often feel what the other person is feeling in that moment, sometimes even without the visual. So in that sense, the feeling comes first, and then I'll see a visual representation. So as I was studying synesthesia, there was this other subcategory of synesthesia called ideasthesia. So instead of the syn, synesthesia, it's ideasthesia. So we're looking at first a concept or abstract and then transferring to a sense experience. So with synesthesia, it's a sense in a sense, whereas with ideasthesia, it's something abstract that is then being translated into a sense. So this may be that I am talking with someone and I see a visual in my head, which makes me feel a certain way in my body, which I can then ask them about, and perhaps I have tapped into something that was an experience for them. Or it can go the other way around, and I see something on them in their body, like I see body language, and I start to feel that internally. So that would be a sight to a feeling, to a sense. And then there's also the other way around where it starts as an idea and then moves to a sensory experience, which is what we were talking about earlier, that you were kind of experiencing in meditation, or when we experience hearing about something and then all of a sudden our body responds. It starts as an idea in our mind and then we have a sensory response to it, which is an aspect of synesthesia, and I would say it's probably the most common because most people can do that, not everyone. Not everyone is visual and can bring that up in their mind or experience the senses through a prompt or an idea. But many more can than are considered as having synesthesia. And that must be a word for those type of people, right? It is, I just can't say it. It's like synesthete. Yeah, I don't know. I would say it wrong. Right. I don't say people with synesthesia. I've seen it spelled out on paper, but that's another issue that I often have. I don't think that it's anything related to synesthesia, but I read a lot of books, but I don't hear it because I learn better visually than auditorily. I don't absorb information as well auditorily, so if I'm reading a lot of information, that doesn't mean I'll always pronounce everything right because I may not have heard it be spoken. So I can see the word in my head. That's another thing. I can visualize the word in my head, but I can't pronounce it. Right, because you've never heard it spoken aloud. You wouldn't know how it's said. And there's always alternative pronunciations as well. There's no telling how each word should be said. Keffer is one of those. I heard it saying keffer, and then I heard a bunch of people saying keefer, and I, to this day, have no idea what the correct word is. Or keffir. Or keffir. So that is the goat milk yogurt. It's like a liquid yogurt. I don't know either. I've heard a few different pronunciations. So what do you think synesthesia is, a superpower? Well, I guess we'd have to define superpower to answer that question. I think anything that we can use to our advantage in a way that gives us leverage or extra ability could be considered a superpower. If it's out of the realm of normal experience and it's something that we can leverage for benefit, I would classify that as a superpower versus, you know, if it's not for benefit but it's still something outside of the realm of normal but we experience it as unpleasant, I don't think anybody would call that a superpower. They might call that like a kryptonite or, you know, a weakness that is outside of the realm of normality. So it really is in how do we experience this as either a gift or as a disability. And I think that has a lot to do with if we get into, you know, arguments about whether to label or not label someone with a diagnosis. Well, for some people having that diagnosis is really helpful and allows them to leverage an understanding of their abilities and really train and work with them. For others that might feel really limiting and debilitating, in which case feeling like they were defined with a disability, they may perceive their difference of traits in a very different manner than somebody who sees it as a superpower, which I do believe that in general I would consider neurodivergence a superpower because when you have a different way of perceiving or seeing the world, that is the training ground for innovation. Yeah, thinking differently can always provide some advantages and help you to see things that other people don't. And that can be helpful in many forms of business and life, and that's where you get innovation is through seeing things differently and creating paradigm shifts, which then create like whole new industries that didn't exist before. So certainly I think you see a lot of that neurodivergence in tech startups and the most successful entrepreneurs seem to be on the spectrum because they really see the world very differently than most and were able to break out and create something totally unique in the world. Yeah, we were listening to a podcast today where the guest on the podcast was, she had like super smell, basically like a super ability to smell nuanced smells of disease. And so she started to see the correlation between certain smells and certain diseases and is actually able to more accurately diagnose Parkinson's than many tests with early detection because she can smell what early Parkinson's smells like. And so you could see how that could be a superpower, but also because of her ability with smell, it does affect her everyday life to where she says she has to take different routes to get places because some are just overwhelming with the certain smells that she can't experience. And so something might boast to feel like a superpower and a kryptonite because there are limitations that come with feeling and experiencing everything. And yet when we have the ability to control the use of those abilities, that's when we can really leverage it as a superpower. And so that's what I think of when I think of like the X-Men and Professor X's School for the Gifted. He was helping them learn how to train their power, how to control it because when you can't control it, it controls you. But when you can control when you want to be able to use those gifts and when you want to be able to focus on other things to shift attention and be able to not experience maybe some of the drawbacks of the gifts, then we have more range, more ability, and happier lives. That's where I kind of have been brainstorming this school, this online school, the Multiverse, to help train neurodivergent senses to really use them as these like peak superpower abilities and also help people feel more comfortable with what their experience is in the sensory experience and to feel like they're not alone because I think a big part of any type of divergence is feeling like nobody understands. Yeah, there's a lot of people that feel that way, feel kind of isolated or like too unique, like they don't fit in. So I think that's a very common experience and probably more and more, the more personalized our media experience and our diet of information becomes, I think the more divergent each individual will be. When we grew up, pretty much everybody would read the same books, would watch the same several channels on TV. Everybody had a lot of the same references for movies, and then now just the Internet has opened up all of this creative expression that pretty much everybody has their own personalized playlist of movies, of film, of games, and it's hard to really have common ground. So we're all kind of diverging in a lot of ways with all of our sense inputs, I think, and it's creating more and more diversity within the human population. Yeah, that's so interesting because I tend to think that the more authentically we can live, like true to our coding and our programming that we come in with, the less we have to mask and conform and all of that. But at its most extreme, that could look like a lot of separation. Yeah, everybody is just kind of tuned out from the rest of the world and everybody just has their own personalized channel in a way, and it's kind of gotten that way with News Feed as well. You can be on the same planet, the same country, the same town even, but you can be receiving completely different information each day and it really colors your worldview, and we're seeing that tremendously now. In this country, we're getting ready for the general elections coming tomorrow, and it just seems like a device of time and people just see the world so differently depending on what information they're taking in. And I can see that with your sense information. Not everyone perceives the same things the same. Everybody sees through different eyes, and some of those eyes even have sounds associated with them. Well, and that's where we can, I think, as a collective, we can really learn from the principle of synesthesia and using all senses. When we can feel into another's senses, we can have more understanding. There are times that my best experiences are when I can feel somebody else's joy or the positive feelings that they're feeling. I can experience and feel those, and I can also feel their pain, and I can feel their position, and so sometimes that's overwhelming. Sometimes that's a great gift, and I think we can all kind of learn from that aspect of it when we can hold multiple viewpoints and opinions and in the same way that we can hold all senses in our awareness. I think that probably, if I had to guess, people who experience synesthesia who can hold all senses in their awareness probably are also able to better hold all opinions in their awareness and understand where others might be coming from. It was an interesting story about the woman with the super smell. I guess she might know that someone has a specific disease, but doesn't necessarily know if they have received that diagnosis, so then she needs to decide whether or not to share that information with them. I believe she just said that she wasn't going to do that at all. Even though she might say, smell cancer on someone, she wouldn't tell them. Yeah, I wouldn't either. It would be too big a burden, I guess. Often, if I have a sense about something and it's negative, I feel like I should keep that to myself. Yeah, has that ever happened to you where maybe as a child you shared something and it upset someone? Oh yeah, which I think we talked about in the previous podcast when you were kind of working with me on finding your voice. Definitely, I learned to stop saying certain things because it makes people uncomfortable. Yeah, I've experienced that. Also, I truly, at my core, don't want to change people. I wouldn't want them to change based on something that I said, because I think that that's their journey. Now, if someone asked me, I would answer. So they would have to know that you have that ability. Well, you had told me a story about how you were able to identify a room full of babies just by their smell. Yeah. So you did a blind smell test on how many babies were there in the room? I don't know. A dozen? Yeah, maybe a dozen. Yeah, and you were able to, without picking them up, without touching them, just someone held them under your nose and you took a sniff. You could identify who each baby was. And it used to actually drive my mom crazy because she'd tell me to stop sniffing people's heads. It's not like a socially appropriate thing. But I could tell so much information from someone's smell. Gosh, I'm putting all my weirdness on here. But my mom would tell you probably loads of stories about how weird I was as a kid. But, yeah, I used to smell people's heads. I was a massive baby. I understand. A lot of people smell babies. Joe Biden smelling people's heads. I was like, you know what? You might have been gathering information. I do feel like you can identify a lot of things by someone's smell. And I always have had a really strong sense of smell to the point that sometimes I'll get bad headaches from certain beds. Perfumes. Immediately. Yeah. And Ara, my oldest, is that way. And we went to—one time this sticks out because it was such a big deal that we were at this place and she smelled a smell and threw up everywhere. And we had to leave the situation because she had such a strong sense of smell and gag reflex. And so we learned what things to avoid because she has very strong reactions to it. So I do think, from what I've read, synesthesia and heightened sensitivity for sensory input is definitely genetic. And I see that in all my kids. So I'm going to jump in here and just give a quick disclaimer. Mom, dad, or kids, if you're listening to this podcast, go ahead and skip the next six minutes. And now back to our regularly recording podcast. So one of the most profound synesthesia states that you've experienced is whenever you experience my orgasm. Right. Yeah. So what does that feel like to you? I can't believe I'm going to go on record talking about this. It is the coolest thing because it brings a whole new meaning to the other person's experience truly being just even so much more absorbing than your own. It's so much better than just a regular experience of orgasming, which is fantastic, but nothing like how holistic, I guess, experiencing somebody else's is, which honestly attributed to me actually enjoying sex because I think like for many women that I've talked to, they don't experience enjoyable enough orgasm to enjoy sex, and so they kind of see it as a chore, particularly a lot of women who are exhausted or have a lot of responsibilities and just see it as one more thing they have to do. And I think for most of my 20s and part of my 30s, I felt that way also until I experienced this. And once I did, I actually Googled it after it happened. I Googled is an emotional orgasm a thing because it didn't feel tied to any kind of like physical stimulation. It felt like my full body just exploded in like happiness. It's like the only way I get things to describe it. It wasn't even like hypersexual in feeling. It was like the most ecstatic, happy feeling you could experience, and it was like the joy of another person. It was like being able to live inside the joy of another person. I don't even know how to describe that without talking about that experience because I thought how could I talk about this without saying it was an orgasm. But it really is like the most all-encompassing sensory experience where all of the senses felt like just holistically entwined to this like. It's probably the closest I've ever understood anyone talking about like a state of bliss. Yeah, it sounds amazing. I wish I could show everybody how to do it, but I don't have a clue what I do. So now, as it's been, I experience like kind of a merge where I don't know where I end and you begin. And that's something that I have maybe shared with one other person because they were asking me why our sex life is so good, I guess. But they were asking me like, oh, is it mature, is it whatever? And I was like, no, gosh, no. But then when I was explaining why, they're like, how do you do it? Like how do you access that? And the only thing that I can explain is like there comes a point where I can't tell what's me and what's you. And I can feel the waves that I think you are feeling. And it's something that causes my whole body to just – it's not localized. It feels great for me too that you can share that bliss and that experience. So I'm really appreciative of it and to be able to share that with you. And I wish that was something that you could pass along to me because everybody needs to experience that type of bliss. And it is a synesthesia in a way because you are feeling multi-sensory experience. And I have felt that in the joining like where two flesh become one and then like you don't know where one body ends and the other begins. And that is a blurring and expanding, I think, of sense. Like when you tune into one sense only, you can't experience that. You know where each tactile nerve and feeling and sensory input is coming from. But when you can open your awareness and move it outside of a local focal point, now your awareness is expanded in such a way that your sensory experience is all intermixed and to the point where you're not just experiencing your own but you're experiencing someone else's concurrently. And that is the most extreme example of synesthesia that I have. Yeah, I can definitely see that. And I have seen colors come to my mind even like in a dark room with my eyes closed. Yeah, there's like rush of emotions or warmth or heat, electricity, sometimes color. I can definitely see in that state of ecstasy or orgasmic delight that it can lead to the multi-sensory experience. And see, feel, touch, taste, touch, they all kind of blend in a way. There are some great advantages to synesthesia and that's the best way to push it. Well, thank you for sharing that candid moment. I'm sorry if that was too much. We should probably put a little disclaimer or warning before it if people want to fast forward through that. Could be. Mom, dad, if you don't want to listen, just skip that part. Skip that. Yeah, but that is one of the best experiences that you have with the synesthesia. So, definitely want to share that as an aspect. I would be so fascinated and interested if anyone else has experienced that because that is something that I've never been able to talk to somebody who's had that same feeling. And I'm curious. Yeah. Yeah, I feel some of that, but maybe not to the extent that you are. I think you feel everything just more deeply. I feel much more steady in my emotions, very small ebbs and crests, but you definitely have bigger swings and I think you feel more deeply than I do. So, that would make sense that you might also be able to even feel what I'm feeling and have great empathy for that. You always can tell when I'm off or when I'm upset for any reason and you're very caring and compassionate and empathetic and will want to resolve it and help. Although, sometimes for me, when I'm feeling down, I need a little time to myself, a little space and alone time and not always like, hey, what's wrong? What's going on? I notice the second your face shifts, I'm like, oh, no. What happened? Right. But I usually, I hope I do this in a good way, I try to ask, what do you need? And so, if you express, I think I just need to put earbuds in and totally tune out for a while. I try to. Yeah, sometimes I just need to get outside and do some yard work or something and just kind of move some energy both along and just get outside and maybe have some fresh air or tune into something else, listen to a podcast. That actually makes me think of another aspect of synesthesia that I really experience strongly, which is when you psycho outside. It's just that linking up doesn't just happen with other people. Often I can find myself feeling into like a tree or an environment, and so the space that I'm in has a whole sensory experience. And I can feel, I don't even know how to describe it. All the senses feel different in different environments, and I know that there is different sensory input already happening. So it's not just, oh, man, how to describe it. It's not just like, oh, I hear birds. Oh, I feel the texture on this tree. Oh, I feel the wind on my face. It's not like just the five senses and sensory input, but certain environments have like a feeling or like almost a personality. And you may experience that with like an animal or a tree or something, like you could feel into the personality of that. But some days it's like that on steroids. It's like it's telling a story. Yeah. Maybe a way of communicating with animals or plants. Do you remember when that squirrel was yelling at me? Yeah. He was following me around and like trying to communicate. I know, Dr. Doolittle. I don't know what he was trying to say. Yeah, this time you went on a walk by yourself, and you were seeing the squirrel kept following you, and he was chattering and chirping at you. I videoed it and showed you, but it was like the whole walk, the whole park. He would just like be a couple steps behind me, and then he would just get real loud and get my attention and turn around and I'd listen to him, and I'd stop and he'd stop, or she, I don't know, and it felt like he. But it was like really animal. Yeah. Very, very interesting. What was the message? I have not a clue. Like I said, I am not claiming like I'm not an animal communicator. I do not have some kind of like tuned in, tapped in pulse on animals, but that one seemed to be wishing I did. Yeah, I think animals wouldn't like to be able to communicate with us. I think we are probably just too noisy in our minds to handle that kind of bandwidth, but I do believe it's possible. I've met people that can communicate with animals. I totally see that as a human potential, but I think it takes like a very quiet mind and patience. Well, knowing that language, like with anything, if you speak English and someone speaks French, you may be able to discern so much from body language or inference, but there's still going to be some communication barriers, and that's the way I see it with animals. Like they are communicating in their own way, and many of them we do understand because we get familiar with certain animals and we know when they act a certain way. They're wanting a certain thing or, you know, we do communicate with animals, so I guess I shouldn't entirely say I'm not an animal communicator, but we notice patterns with our animals. Yeah, dogs can communicate and they get to know you and their patterns and they can read your body language and know you're going to get up before you do. Oh, that was a cool study that I was reading this morning on synesthesia in monkeys because they have determined that, I don't know how they tested these monkeys and decided they had synesthesia, but the synesthesia monkeys that they tested, they hooked them up to these machines that were reading their brainwaves and their brain would show a certain pattern when they observed humans doing a certain behavior. So just for the sense of ease of explaining this, this was not the way it was, but let's say the pattern that they noticed on the brain scan when they saw a human jump up and down was like green lights blinking. And then the pattern that they observed when they saw a human laying down was red lights blinking. And then the pattern that they observed when they watched a human spinning in circles was maybe orange lights blinking. Then if the human was entirely still, they would start to predict in their mind what that human was going to do. So they would start to see these colors or whatever. Like let's say they started to see the green and they were trying to predict that that human was about to jump up and down. And so these monkeys with synesthesia were more accurate at pattern recognizing and predicting the patterns of humans based on a, we don't know, a picture or a color or something they were seeing in their mind that was actually having a response on these machines that were hooked up to their brainwaves. That was correctly categorizing and predicting what the human's next behavior would be. Fascinating. Yeah, that is fascinating. Yeah, so it may be a future predictor. And this Scottish woman that had the amazing sense of smell, she said she was in some way predicting the future of these people because she could sense a disease that may be in their medical history, but it's not yet. And yeah, that's, that is a predictive ability that's almost like seeing into the future. I do think that we are going to be able to scientifically prove at some point things that seem, you know, really out there right now, like psychic phenomena, fortune telling, all of these things that we may associate with. Well, I don't know. I think a lot of people think it's just fake, you know, pseudoscience. I think we'll be able to show that it's sensory perception, just senses that others aren't aware of, just like a dog whistle. Right. Yeah. And dogs have much better sense of smell than humans and can even detect cancer. There are cancer screening dogs, just like drug sniffing dogs or bomb sniffing dogs. You can train them to identify certain smells, and it's so much more powerful than the human sense. Yeah, there's always going to be outliers maybe that are closer to the dog on that spectrum. If we can communicate with the dog, then we can just ask them what we're looking for and tell them what different diseases smell like. It'll be interesting to see if they're starting to integrate some of these animals into diagnostic care, or maybe the multi-sensory humans too. And I think probably if we boil down synesthesia to its most simple, like possible cause, as you were saying that, I was thinking probably like the person who is smelling a disease and realizing that that smell is related to that disease. It's connecting a meaning making with a sensory experience. And at some point, that is trained out of many people to connect meaning to sensory experience. So while we may say, oh, I smell garlic, we could assume that's because garlic is somewhere near us. But in a sense like this, she had a broad enough perspective and awareness to say, I smell this. And I know that it's not just because this is cooking somewhere. There might be another meaning why I'm smelling this on this person. And so it's those innovative thinkers that create meaning making around their experience that might be onto something. And I think it's a really powerful, super power. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We hope you found this conversation helpful and inspiring. Whether you're here for insight, some encouragement, or just a good story, it means a lot that you're sharing your time with us. Are you overwhelmed by a constant rush of thoughts and emotions? Does everything feel like too much and it's hard to control how you respond? Are you worried about what others are thinking? Are you worried about what others are thinking or struggling to find your place in social situations? Do you secretly sense that you have some super power abilities that would really shine if they weren't hidden under the weight of overwhelm and confusion of how to fit in this world? If any of this resonates, you are not alone. And I have something special in the work just for you. I am thrilled to introduce the Multiversity School for Gifted Adults. The Multiversity is a new kind of space designed for neurodivergent adults who crave connection, understanding, sensory training, and growth. Here you'll find a community that not only celebrates your unique gifts, but also understands the challenges you face. This isn't just another course. It's a place to belong, a place to thrive. Soon, I'll share more details. But for now, know that the Multiversity is being built with you in mind. It's a space for exploration, learning, and connecting with others who truly get it. So stay tuned. The journey is about to begin. If you enjoyed today's episode, please take a moment to like, follow, and subscribe. If something we talked about really hit home, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And of course, if you know someone who'd love to be a part of the conversation, go ahead and share this show with them. 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