I know how you feel – these words take on a new meaning in the mouth of a person with tactile mirror synesthesia. While it’s hard to imagine, some people may actually feel the pain or pleasure that is being inflicted on someone else. This extreme form of empathy is the subject of much research by scientists and causes as many problems for those who experience it.
Mirror reflection
The very term “synesthesia” refers to the phenomenon in which the impressions of one sense trigger the reactions of the others. People with this ability may smell colors or perceive visual stimuli when listening to music. The writer Vladimir Nabokov and the painter Vincent van Gogh were probably the synesthetic. Richard Feynman, the famous physicist and Nobel laureate, argued that the elements of the equation took on different colors in his head. However, tactile mirror synesthesia is different. A patient diagnosed with the condition feels a touch when he observes the person being touched. This can take place in two ways – the stimulus can occur on the same side of the body or in its mirror image. The feeling of being touched has the dimension of a real experience that is not consciously evoked, e.g. the pain that such a person will feel at the sight of someone else’s accident does not have to differ from the suffering of the victim.
Research on tactile mirror synesthesia was carried out by scientists from the University of Delaware. Of the more than two thousand students they surveyed, forty-five were diagnosed as synesthetic. Many of them had no idea that they experienced the world differently than the rest of the population. They were shocked, said Jared Medina of the University of Delaware.
Each test student sat at a table with palms facing up or down. His task was to watch a series of short films where hands were touched in different places. Students were asked about the stimuli they felt – where and with what intensity they felt the touch. Among those diagnosed with tactile mirror synesthesia, the sensations differed depending on the position of their hands. When they were turned face up, like the hands shown on the screen, the stimuli were felt with great intensity. However, when their position differed from that of the hands seen in the video, phantom touch appeared less frequently. As Jared Medina argues, this may be because the brain is trying to align its hand with the palm on the screen, as if asking itself the question: Could she belong to me?
Carrie DePasquale, also part of the research team, was surprised by the intensity of the sensations some of the students felt. – Many of them told me about their impressions. They felt almost as if they were actually part of the movies being shown – they felt the touch, pain and other stimuli experienced by the characters on the screen, he adds.
The man of the future?
However, tactile mirror synesthesia is not just about touch and pain. People with it report much more complicated and unusual “ailments”. Cognitive neuroscience professor Jamie Ward of the University of Sussex said patients experiencing tactile mirror synesthesia, “seeing an exceptionally tall person, may feel that their body is elongating.” As Ward explains, some of his subjects had a tendency to spontaneously repeat the movements of the observed people – there is a known case of a synesthetic whose body moved in response to a watched gymnastic performance. The patient did not even realize that he was imitating someone.
How it’s possible? According to Professor Jamie Ward, people with tactile mirror synesthesia are different from others in how their brain perceives the body. According to the theory developed by Ward’s research team, the problem lies in the disruption of the mechanisms responsible for distinguishing oneself from others. This opens the way to a whole new world of stimuli where your own experiences are based on what the other person is going through. This theory complements the previous hypothesis that tactile mirror synesthesia is associated with overactivity of mirror neurons, which are likely to be responsible for predicting behavior and distinguishing emotions in others.
While some would like to believe that mirror tactile synesthesia will evolve into the “superman of the future” in the future, Ward is skeptical about this. Being a synesthetic has as many advantages as disadvantages. Feeling such an extreme form of empathy can paradoxically desensitize you. “We can avoid helping others if we start sharing their pain too intensely,” Ward notes. This is confirmed by the testimony of one of the respondents who admitted that she could never understand people who enjoy watching horror movies or laughing at the misfortune of heroes on the screen. There is nothing strange about it – while they are just watching, she feels it all.