synaesthesia

At Bartleby.com synaesthesia or synesthesia is defined as a condition in which one type of sensation evokes the experience of another, so that when hearing a sound one sees a color. It seems that a small percentage of people experience this but it is not a disease. It's more of a neurological condition where the senses overlap. For many it involves the colours and sounds or even attribute personality characteristics to inanimate or abstract things. Often, I understand that they have a spatial understanding of time.

Why am I blogging about this? Well I just remembered a friend years ago asked me if I had this condition. And I immediately said yes even though I have never been diagnosed it. I have read about it and seen documentaries on the subject. Of course I can see a colour and tell you what colour it is correctly. But ask me to imagine a colour and I can only feel it as sensation of touch. Significantly I really don't dream in colour only black and white even though I know what colours things are in my dreams when its important. Fortunately touch is pretty broad for example it includes temperature, pressure, texture and location.

This helped me realise why focusing has been helpful for me at times as much as dreams have been also. Focusing was first brought to attention by Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher and psychotherapist. He believed that those who benefited most from psychotherapy had the ability to sense vague, still unformed feelings in their body and connect this ‘felt sense’ with words and images that were used to describe it. I have found that attentiveness to my body feelings is a form of listening to myself and recognising what is going on inside of me, which in turn helps me to be aware of external relationships and situations, which in turn can heighten both my intuition and even discernment.

All this has just suggested to me why my whole sense of time is currently disrupted. I've noticed the return of my Bppv (Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo). I had in in the early summer bad enough to go to the doctor and sit and wait for 2 hours for a 5 minute session. But it went away or at least I edited it out again. Recently I been quite tired and the vertigo has returned albeit mildly. More a little twitch as the world jerks perceptively, rather than the wild spinning of before. Still my sense of the passing of time is wrong or off!

Still I wonder why my friend asked me whether I had synaesthesia years ago?