{"id":2025,"date":"2010-12-08T14:08:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-08T13:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravenfamily.org\/sam\/?p=2025"},"modified":"2010-12-08T14:08:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-08T13:08:00","slug":"mutant-brain-synaesthesia-overactive-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ravenfamily.org\/sam\/2010\/12\/08\/mutant-brain-synaesthesia-overactive-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"Mutant brain, synaesthesia, overactive imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"avatar\"Having synaesthesia means that I see things differently from others all of the time. The very word “see” is generally inappropriate. Light hits the retina, electrical impulses travel back along the optic nerve, and about there the similarities stop. In me that signal is processed by the brain through a weird amalgam of all my other senses. My synaesthesia even includes one of the senses not considered in the usual five: proprioception<\/a>. Is it because I lost an eye at a critical age, rather than being born blind in one, or losing it much later? I don’t know. Sometimes I think that could explain many things about me, from the way I smell colours and inhabit the shapes of sounds to the way I have to do some things right handed and some things left.<\/p>\n

On the whole, though, I think that what I am probably doing there is looking for a reason. And, a lot of the time, things just are. They’re not purposeful, they’re not meaningful, they’re not deliberate, they’re not fair or unfair… They just are<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I get a special thrill from experiencing a similar sense of wonder and joy at a particular thing to that of someone else. While I know it’s terribly unlikely that the other person is excited by the shape formed by that particular aroma, or the soundscape that whispers and hums in the background to a piece of scenery, the sharing of that childlike marvel that the world can be so astonishing and wonderful is more than enough.<\/p>\n

Last night the temperature was -15°C and the skies were clear. Outside the snow froze surface-crisp. And how it sparkled! We have a rough patch of waste ground out back, and there’s a car park surrounded by a chain-link fence. It’s not beautiful. It’s no Midnight<\/a>. Yet, even so, it was astonishing, because a myriad diamond glitters danced across the snow. For a moment I could imagine that stars have a spawning cycle that includes a terrestrial phase, the way coral has a planktonic larval stage, and these were the babies fallen to Earth. Frood also thought it was brilliant and we stood in a darkened room with our noses pressed against the glass, staring.<\/p>\n

I decided to photograph it. Sadly the battery on my camera died and I was forced to use my phone, which doesn’t have the optics to do it justice. Although, of course, for me the synaesthetic response is different when looking at photographs. I see the photograph, not the thing in the photograph. So no photograph can ever capture the moment, despite what the camera adverts say.<\/p>\n

Doesn’t stop me trying.<\/p>\n

\"Lunar<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having synaesthesia means that I see things differently from others all of the time. The very word “see” is generally inappropriate. Light hits the retina, electrical impulses travel back along the optic nerve, and about there the similarities stop. 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