
A rare condition causes a doctor to experience other people's sensations - Petiver
http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/is-mirror-touch-synesthesia-a-superpower-or-a-curse
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atmosx
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._

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anigbrowl
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.

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guyzero
Mental phenomenon do have something to do with your nervous system...?

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comrh
One of my favorite podcasts (really any NPR podcast) did part of an episode on
this:
[http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/382451600/entangleme...](http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/382451600/entanglement)

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.

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clamprecht
I mis-read the title as "A race condition ..." Too much multi-threaded coding.

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Kenji
I came here to say exactly the same, haha. Now I wonder, how does the brain
handle concurrency.

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anaphor
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.

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Mz
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._

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Hanua
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.

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irishcoffee
> “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.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9195553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9195553)

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Raster42
I really want to hear what happens when a mirror-touch synesthete watches
porn.

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jessaustin
"Oh, she's faking it!"

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theseatoms
Ironically, this seems like a very hard condition to empathize with.

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hosh
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.

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theseatoms
From what I understand, we all have mirror neurons.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron)

So that's probably contributing to empathy in all of us.

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shameerc
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...](http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-
national/tp-kerala/abled-truly-with-a-difference/article4308624.ece)

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meric
Reminds me of this: [http://liveboldandbloom.com/08/self-improvement/empath-
trait...](http://liveboldandbloom.com/08/self-improvement/empath-traits-of-
highly-sensitive-person)

"Highly Sensitive Persons" and "Empaths".

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michaelbuddy
if the title were accurate this was exactly what Carl Pilkington said would be
exciting technology on the Ricky Gervais podcast / audiobook, teeheehee.

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anigbrowl
Sounds like a case of early-life Altruizine exposure.

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kungfooman
Click bait title, still interesting.

