Our five senses - sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste - are rather conservative and limited. This is manifested in the fact that the human ear hears sounds in the range from 20 to 20,000 hertz and is incapable of receiving visual images, the skin detects tactile sensations, but does not smell, and so on. Nevertheless, this does not mean that sensory systems are independent from each other.
Lost sensitivity compensation
Despite the narrow one-sided focus, all senses work together, creating an overall picture of the world. At the same time, the insufficient functioning of any analyzer leads to the fact that other sensory organs begin to fill its role. Take, for example, hearing and tactile sense, which are very developed in the blind. In turn, deaf and dumb people are excellent physiognomists and psychologists who can read lips and master gestures.
However, this kind of replacement of one organ with another is never complete. The blind remain blind, and the deaf remain deaf, since the ear cannot see and the eye cannot hear, no matter how developed they are. However, there are exceptions to this rule.
Synesthesia as an additional feeling
Synesthesia (translated from Greek - "simultaneous sensation", "joint feeling") is the perception that an impression specific to one sense organ is accompanied by another sensation or image that is not characteristic of it. It is not considered a pathology and does not interfere with the person who has it. On the contrary, a significant degree of synesthesia enriches the spiritual world of a person, which becomes brighter and more saturated …
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It is believed that synesthesia is most pronounced during childhood. To one degree or another, adults also possess it, despite the fact that with age, the final differentiation and delimitation of all five sense organs take place. Synesthetic sensations in adults most often arise by association, conditioned by upbringing and life experience. So, for example, for Europeans, black is felt gloomy and oppressive, while in the East, white is seen as such, since there it is associated with funerals and mourning.
In the case of moderate synesthesia by association, the signal is duplicated in another sensory system, as a result of which information is better remembered. On this occasion, an anecdotal case is typical, when a certain citizen got out of the car for a walk at a large station, having memorized the train number - 1492. “The year of America's discovery, - thought the citizen, - I will not forget …”. However, a few minutes later he was running along the platform, asking all passers-by: "Do you know in what year America was discovered? …".
In contrast, individuals with congenital synesthesia initially have combined impressions. Moreover, side synesthetic images appear in them initially and only then - sensations with the help of the main sensory organ.
This ability was possessed, for example, by our journalist Solomon Shershevsky, whose sound generated simultaneously the sensations of light, color, taste and touch. Moreover, his additional sensations turned out to be so strong that sometimes they overshadowed the main feeling. Shershevsky himself reported one such case: “I go up to the ice cream saleswoman and ask what varieties she has. "Everything is full!" - She replies in such a tone that a whole bunch of coals and ash flies out of her mouth. People's voices are bouquets of flowers, puffs of smoke or fog. I am so fond of looking at voices that sometimes I cannot understand what they are talking to me about."
Apparently, due to the fact that chaos or unusual arrangement of objects causes confusion in their memory, synesthetics are very scrupulous in matters of external order. In any case, none of them will start work until they are sure that all the things on his desk are in their places.
Combination of sound and color
The most common manifestation of synesthesia is the so-called color hearing, which, of course, is associated with the importance and more frequent use of this type of information.
The famous 16th century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, for example, played a note to his students, and then showed them the corresponding color card for memorization.
But for the first time, Isaac Newton drew the attention of scientists to the similarity of color and sound. Studying the color spectrum, he found a correspondence between seven notes in an octave and seven colors of the rainbow. This was later confirmed by the monk scientist Louis-Bertrand Castel, who created the color harpsichord. When a key was pressed, a color stripe adequate to the sound appeared.
The interaction of sound and color in the 17th-18th centuries was studied in various academies. There it was found that only one specific color of the spectrum corresponds to each note in an octave. However, such a harsh statement was later refuted by the experience of si-aesthetics, in whom the combination of sounds and colors was of a purely individual character …
A characteristic example of synesthesia is the work of some outstanding artists and composers, among whom one can name N. Rimsky-Korsakov, M. Churlionis, B. Asafiev. It is known that A. Scriabin, being a synesthetic from birth, wrote his symphonic poem "Prometheus" solely in order to put it in color. During the composer's lifetime, this plan was not fully realized, since the corresponding technologies were in their infancy. Nevertheless, attempts to combine music and color were carried out already in 1915 at Carnegie Hall using a special color organ.
We add that such a combination, achieved today with the help of special equipment, is mandatory for all discos, where it enhances the effect of musical performance. Not without success, it is also used in 3D cinemas, where the impact on other analyzers is also applied: vestibular, olfactory and tactile.
Something about other combinations
The combination of other senses is more rare, which, of course, is caused by their lower importance for human life.
So, for example, R. Saitovich, who devoted much effort to the study of this phenomenon, found only one case of "audiomotor" synesthesia. A 12-year-old boy he was studying involuntarily took various poses when certain words were spoken to him aloud. And when he was asked why he was doing this, the child replied that he felt more comfortable this way. Moreover, the delay in one or another posture by an effort of will, although it turned out to be possible for him, was always accompanied by unpleasant feelings. All this could be attributed to childhood fantasies, but when Saitovich, many years later, found the same test subject, the now adult man, in response to the same words, began to assume the same postures again.
It is noteworthy that M. Sholokhov, not knowing anything about such phenomena, spontaneously endowed his eccentric grandfather Shchukar from Virgin Soil Upturned with the features of a synesthetic. So, for example, the notorious Shchukar sincerely believed that the word "watercolor" means "good girl" and "border" means "bad", although no one taught him this …
We add that by and large any language and speech, both oral and written, are in their origin the result of such synesthesia. In them, the association and recoding, for example, of auditory information into visual and symbolic images, which are then historically fixed in the culture of the people, take place in the same way.
Supersensory perception - complete movement of the senses
It is noted that people with developed synesthesia have paranormal abilities, and all psychics are synesthetics. However, there are also differences between them. So, for example, if a synesthetic person sees sounds or smells an image, he always hears those sounds and sees the object. With the complete movement of the senses, which occurs with psychics, the sought-after object may generally be beyond the limits of perception or be associated with another, nonspecific sensory organ, which translates the signal into visible or audible images.
Take so-called skin vision, for example. Even the psychiatrist Lombroso, in his book "Genius and Insanity", wrote about his patients, one of whom could distinguish colors with his palms, another heard with his eyebrows, and the third read a book with the skin of his stomach.
But it is a completely different matter when it comes to the method of obtaining information, in which its source is generally inaccessible to a person, for example, when a psychic with the help of clairvoyance receives information from past centuries or sees an object that is a thousand kilometers away from him.
We can say that in all these cases the information enters the brain directly, bypassing any sensory organs. One gets the impression that the psychic does not really need these organs themselves. This is just a binding, a symbol, but by no means a tool for gaining any knowledge.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №44. Author: Arkady Vyatkin