NewScientist (26 May 2018) reports on the latest synaesthesia:
A WOMAN can’t help laughing uproariously when she sees other people being tickled.
She has mirror-touch synaesthesia, a condition that makes people feel sensations on their own body when they watch other people touching things.
To see how this relates to tickling, Vilayanur Ramachandran and Claudia Sellers at the University of California, San Diego, recorded how much the woman laughed in different cases, such as when she was spontaneously tickled or when viewing funny situations.
They found that, in general, she didn’t laugh any more than a non-synaesthete. However, when watching someone else being tickled under an armpit, she burst out laughing and tried to make it stop by placing her hand under her own armpit – which seemed to help (Neurocase, doi.org/cpsb).
The spectrum of connections the human brain can experiment with can be a bit dizzying. You can call it mistakes or you can call it evolutionary dead-ends, but in the end the deviance from the neurotypical can be quite unsettling.
