Hear the sunset, taste the sunset, touch the sunset
Synaesthesia is a remarkable condition, a sort of joining of the senses...
… but before I explain more, I should back-pedal a little and just point out that our brains are pretty groovy… I mean- totally brilliant!
Think about it – your brain floats about in a bath of warm cerebrospinal fluid in the black vault of your skull, with no direct access to the outside world, and it manages to turn nothing other than some basic electrical signals, into your own vividly-felt reality.
In other words,
your reality is constructed inside your own head from a “squillionth” of the data in the outside world, and yet your brain stitches it tidily together into what you perceive to be a cohesive picture.
To make my point about this a little clearer, consider this for a moment: There is NO SUCH THING as colour in the external world.
“Whaaaat???” I hear you say.
It’s true! Of the humungous spectrum of electromagnetic energy in the universe, our bodies have the apparatus to respond to only an infinitesimal section: about 400-700 nonometers - wavelengths which our brains convert into colours.
In essence, colour is created by our brains. Furthermore, there is no way to know that the colours that you see, in a sunset for example, are the same as the colours that I see when looking at the same sunset.
Even more curiously, for those people who have a rare form of synaesthesia, the “colours” of the sunset are experienced with extra sensations such as taste or smell or a bodily feeling. These people, not only see the sunset, they may also hear the sunset, taste the sunset or touch the sunset!
How fabulous is that!