Synesthesia

Yesterday, the lecturer of Neurobiology course talked about Synesthesia in the class. I'm not sure if you can really call Synesthesia a disease or disorder, because it is a sensory system disorder but it somehow sounds cool. In the brain and human neural system there are some inhibitory pathways that prevent mixing up the data you receive from your individual senses (vision, hearing, ...), but for some people this mechanism is impaired so for example, they smell something but this sensory input in addition to olfactory bulb in the brain, which is responsible for processing odors, reaches to the auditory cortex as well, the region that processes inputs from ears. So these people smell a fragrance and this results in hearing a piece of music!!! You can watch a short documentary about this disorder, bellow. This patient when tastes something visualizes a particular color based on the taste, so he likes to eat chicken with ice cream because their taste results in a beautiful color combination:

Synesthesia

Interestingly, I asked Cecilie, my roommate, about this and she said yes she knows about it, and she is wondering if she has it! Because for her, time is like an ellipse that each month is located at a certain location on the ellipse, and she observes herself on the ellipse based on the date. I was about to say something but my other flat mate asked "nice! Do you see the ellipse around your body? Because the way I see it is around my body and January is in front of me and december is at the back".

At this point I decided to stop the conversation and start looking for new roommates.