ANESTHESIA, SYNESTHESIA and our brain hygiene habits

BY SHANKAR AND ISA TRAVERSO BURGER
**originally published by Distrikt Magazine 02/2006**

Have you ever heard a song that takes you back to the exact feeling as when you heard that song for the first time?
Well, let’s call this feeling a “body taste”.
If you ask yourself what color the number 5 is, do you know? How about number 9 or number 2, can you identify inside your head the colors of these numbers?
This is called synesthesia, and this basically means: two parts of your brain mixing up just a little and giving you, for an instant, images or flavors where there are none, and it’s exactly the opposite of anesthesia, which is the feeling of not feeling, and disconnecting from your senses...But, let’s return to our subject.
I like the way my synesthesia works, since I can really relive memoirs of certain stages of my past just by listening to music; it’s amazing how alive my “body tastes” are when I hear a song, again, after time has passed. I also have a whole palette of colors in my head with the first 20 numbers (1,2,3,4,5,6...) and when I move to the hundreds, I include different colors and backgrounds.
The thing that intrigues me the most is, that my brain can make analogies of people’s names and provide me with different options of food along with their face. For example, if I meet a Mark, I imagine tobacco and brown colors with dry elements, if I meet a Daniela, I usually get a honey image; and this is regardless of the personality of the person.
Why don’t you try to get in touch with your synesthesia? Please take your time to feel this!
Think about these names (I’ll tell you what I think of):
Frank (I think of milk, caramel, jelly) Daniela (honey) Michelle (bees) Dave (pines and green pointy plants)
Think about amounts of money: $10 (brown \black) $200 (greenish) $1,500 (blue\green)
$60,000 (dark blue with white)
In my point of view, this ability or ‘cool disorder’ that we all have, in a smaller or larger concentration, can work for diverse creative and life purposes, since our mind is working and thinking about anything and everything 99% of the time. It’s never quiet! .... I bet this is how magazines are born!
Usually, our mind doesn’t think about positive things or images and this would be the main reason why sometimes it’s so complicated to “be happy”, all the time. By the way, our thinking intentions (positive or negative) are also a habit; the more we use the happy muscle, the stronger and predominant it becomes (like the rest of our muscles and organs in our bodies)...Unfortunately vice- versa also works this way.
This is why meditation works so well for so many people (regardless if the meditation technique is new age, old age, religiously focused or simply about creating pretty images in your head). The whole idea is to try and give your mind a small dose of a healthy pattern in order to make it mature a bit more every time the meditation/habit period takes place.
Hopefully, this next century will be a very productive one on research about our mind and how it focuses; We should learn how to maintain our mental health in order to get positive results; unveiling, in layman’s terms, the next step in human evolution...This would not be the control of our environment and material world like we brag and care for these days, but the control of our minds, our thoughts, ourselves and therefore, our acts that, believe it or not, when focused on a positive way can make an everyday habit work for a common good and wealth. In the end, we are all stranded in the same water or on the same dust balloon, right?
Meanwhile, lets patiently wait doing the new “Office Yoga” and the usual chair stretching exercises that the Japanese are showing, every other month, on TV. By the way, when you get a chance, watch a movie called “What The Bleep Do We Know”.... For me, it shows how all the different ideological trends are uniting little by little, and step by step, towards one single purpose: Doing Good! Or how we say in Spanish, Bien Común.