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Important excerpt (to de-sensetionalize the title):
[..] But to be clear, Salinas cannot read minds. He doesn’t know whether Josh felt the impact of the reflex hammer, and the tingling in his kneecap says more about his own extraordinary nervous system than it does about that of his patient.
Yeah, it kind of makes the entire thing 90% less interesting.
Of course I assumed this was the case before reading it; I'm pretty sure legitimate psychic powers being discovered would warrant more than a HN article.
Even that's misleading - as so many of the examples depend on visual cues, the phenomenon appears to be a purely mental one and has nothing whatsoever to do with one's nervous system.
Mental phenomenon do have something to do with your nervous system...?
Yet the title is "This Doctor Knows Exactly How You Feel". It's almost like they knew we wouldn't have clicked on "This Doctor Cringes Really Hard". Hmmm.
One of my favorite podcasts (really any NPR podcast) did part of an episode on this: http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/382451600/entangleme...
The woman in the podcast is debilitated by it. It also includes her family, specifically her daughters, views on it (she doesn't believe it is real) but also hints she might be developing it as well.
I mis-read the title as "A race condition ..." Too much multi-threaded coding.
I came here to say exactly the same, haha. Now I wonder, how does the brain handle concurrency.
It might actually be the reason why you (and I) misread it. One of the theories of lexical access (how you retrieve the semantic content in your memory through speech/text) is that it starts with the first few sounds/characters and then just picks the one that gets accessed first, which is based on how often you use that word, etc.
In spite of the misleading, click-bait title, I think it is interesting:
Mirror-touch synesthetes struggle with the constant intrusion of others’ feelings. At a symposium on mirror-touch synesthesia last year in London, a woman named Fiona Torrance of Liverpool described how she had once seen one man punch another. She promptly passed out in a car. Her boyfriend at the time found her unconscious and took her to the hospital. “I felt the punch,” she explained. As a child, she once saw a man kill an otter with a spade on television. She was inconsolable for a month, feeling as if she’d killed the otter herself. To this day, she takes medication to control the sensory onslaught, and she does not own a television. A recent episode of the NPR program Invisibilia profiled another woman with the condition who has essentially become a shut-in.
there are so many kinds of synesthesia. having diverse forms of synesthesia myself what I find interesting is that within some forms only direct confrontation or sudden discomfort results in the awareness of them
I m extremely accurate in detecting smells , while certain smells will causes extreme pain . It was only in adulthood that I was confronted to explaining why smelling cooked onions cause so much pain in me.
as a result I realized that I actually smell geographically within a about 1 meter cylindrical field around my head . where as onions are in an area inside my head that hurts though it is the same for, calendrical time and numbers.
We often just question our perception of the world when it is immediately compared to other perceptions, or results in discomfort.
I wonder how diverse human perception of the world can actually be without us knowing. If humanity was blind but one person perceived Eyesight but had never learned to communicate his ability to "foresee things", run without hitting objects , this human wouldn't be able to reflect about it because it wasn't integrated in his way of communication.
Maybe for this human seeing a beautiful sunset would remain a dumb feeling, rather than a realization of what it actually is that made them feel that way, since his communication and reflection of the world was not focused on this sense.
> “heightened empathic ability.” ... condition is often more debilitating than it is empowering.
I experience this in terms of what other people are feeling emotionally. Its awful.
I really want to hear what happens when a mirror-touch synesthete watches porn.
"Oh, she's faking it!"
Ironically, this seems like a very hard condition to empathize with.
I have the same issue, and with synaesthesia in general. In fact, my first (false) reaction is to disbelieve it when somebody tells me they have some form of it.
I am aware it's real and many people have synaesthesia but, I would guess, it's so far outside my perception of the world that my brain immediately wants to dismiss it. An interesting and somewhat annoying condition of my own brain.
I've had this experience from time to time. I don't have this "on" all the time. This has been useful for stuff like martial arts.
It's possible to empathize with, if you have sufficient skill in concentration and visualization. You can empathize with anything.
From what I understand, we all have mirror neurons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
So that's probably contributing to empathy in all of us.
Related : Here is a news about boy who can tell what you are thinking. My friend has met him and told this is true.
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-kerala/a...
Reminds me of this: http://liveboldandbloom.com/08/self-improvement/empath-trait...
"Highly Sensitive Persons" and "Empaths".
if the title were accurate this was exactly what Carl Pilkington said would be exciting technology on the Ricky Gervais podcast / audiobook, teeheehee.
Sounds like a case of early-life Altruizine exposure.
Click bait title, still interesting.