If this kid really has unexplained powers, I feel that he should take advantage of it and collect $1M from the One million dollar challenge
I don't think you understand what I am saying. They might be able to smell or or hear colors but that doesn't mean that those colors actually have a specific smell or tone that everyone with synaesthesia can detect. It is a specific mental association to the individual as opposed to the particular wavelength of light. For example I associate colors with keys (G = Blue, C=Yellow, Am=Red) To a certain extent I can figure out music by hearing it through the mental association of those colors. That said though if I was death I wouldn't be able to tell what key was being played because I saw a color. Synaesthesia isn't the ability to sense something by using another sense to make up for the absence of another sense. Put a way of processing sensory input through multiple channels. From the article you linked: [rquoter]One of the distinctive characteristics of this form of synaesthesia is the fact that people are certain about their perceptions: they feel that their way of experiencing the world is correct, and they become disappointed when they realize there is something that is not quite right. 'Therefore, when a person with grapheme-color synaesthesia indicates that the word table is blue, it is quite probable that if he or she ever sees the same word written in a color other than blue, this word will appear to him or her as wrong and consider it a mistake. The synaesthete might even point out that the word is ugly or that he or she does not like it because it is not correct,' affirms Callejas. Consequently, finding the word table written in red might be unpleasant whereas seeing it in blue might be agreeable. This emotional reaction associated with how synaesthetes perceive consistent or inconsistent stimuli is an extremely interesting subject and has been studied for the first time in this doctoral thesis. [/rquoter] Synaestheists aren't sensing the actual color of the word but the associated color they have. A blind synaesthists if read a passage of multicolored text wouldn't be able to tell exactly what color the words were unless they were the exact color that they had associated with it.
No problem and sorry if I came off a little harsh. It's an interesting topic and one that I didn't realize I had until I few years ago I was talking to my band about how we needed to do this song blue and they said, "as a Blues song?" and I said, "No in G"
Daredevil and now we have professor x. Damn science, you scary! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130827122713.htm
I'm not going to watch a 12 minute video, but there is something called blindsight, where people who are clinically blind can see without being aware of it (or being only marginally aware) using older pathways in the brain connecting with structures regulating circadian rhythms and controlling pupillary response to light. Basically, as long as the eye and the optic nerve are intact, there is a possibility of blindsight. [rquoter] Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind due to lesions in their striate cortex, also known as primary visual cortex or V1, to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see. The majority of studies on blindsight are conducted on patients who are blind on only one side of their visual field. Following the destruction of the striate cortex, patients are asked to detect, localize, and discriminate amongst visual stimuli that are presented to their blindside often in a forced-response or guessing situation, even though they cannot actually see the stimulus. Research shows a surprising amount of accuracy in the guesses of blind patients. This ability to guess, at levels significantly above chance, aspects of a visual stimulus, such as location, or type of movement without any conscious awareness of any stimuli is known as Type 1 blindsight. Type 2 blindsight occurs when patients claim to have a feeling that there has been a change within their blind area, for example, movement, but that it was not a visual percept. Blindsight challenges the common belief that perceptions must enter consciousness to affect our behavior. This phenomenon shows our behavior can be guided by sensory information of which we are completely unaware. [/rquoter]
That is pretty cool but that does bring up the possibility of hacking into someone's brain over the internet.
