Your cell phone rings yellow. WTF?!?! Imagine sounds stirring up colors in your mind or visual patterns eliciting sounds. This is not that uncommon. Synesthesia is a condition where information gathered via one sensory organ like the eyes is accompanied by a totally different sensory experience. This condition is completely involuntary and affects about 1 out of every 23 people. Since synesthetics enjoy a broader sensory experience many of them can re-ascribe incoming sensory information to other sensory organs. How crazy is this? The confines of daily experience do not apply to synesthetics. For a list of famous people with synesthesia click here.

I believe there something beyond just the five tangible senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and vision at play when it comes to our experiences. I think there is a whole other realm of sensation that is not associated with a tangible body part or organ. For example, the color red is a sensory experience gathered by vision. However, when we see the color red it makes us feel a certain way (consciously and subconsciously). The color red stirs up primal feelings of passion, love, heat, attraction and so on. But tell me, where are those sensory experiences located? Maybe "hearing" the color red would inform me of their location. In my mind the intangible sensory experiences result from a combination of tangible sensory organs collecting information. What if it isn't even the incoming sensory information that's responsible for the way we feel and think? What if instead the unity of all these perceptions under one consciousness is what makes them so real and unique to each one of us, even the synesthetics?