Synesthesia is a blurring of the senses. In some people with the condition, motion is perceived as sound, music as colour, taste as shapes.
Grapheme-colour synesthesia is the most common type, which is where people see letters or numbers in specific colours. About four per cent of the population have some form of synesthesia, including Lady Gaga, Billy Joel, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams – and not only musicians.
Vladimir Nabokov and Marilyn Monroe also famously had it. But only 1.6 per cent have mirror-touch synesthesia.And it was in that corridor in that Miami hospital that the implications of the overwhelming ordeal he had just had really hit Salinas, even though at the time he had not been diagnosed. ‘What made that experience really stand out for me was how potent it was, how very extreme,’ he says from his office in New York. (He is now assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and practises at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.) ‘Until then I hadn’t had such an extreme experience – everything that came before that was at the level where I considered it as a part of being – but this was so intense.
Not only the experience of seeing somebody die for the first time, but in such a dramatic and physical fashion.‘I knew this would be a potential issue for me if I was to stay in the medical field – I was going to be seeing a lot more of this and I had to figure out how to work around it.’The very idea that you could take on, or feel, another person’s pain is an excruciating thought, especially if you’re a doctor.
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