Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel by Jason Padgett, Maureen Ann Seaberg Page B

didn’t have quite that much neurological activity. I thought it would be tiring to physically feel so much. But there was some research that showed that those mirror neurons activate the empathy response, and I recognized an increase in this in myself.
    In my case, I felt more in touch with other people’s emotions after my injury than I ever had before. Just being around other people, on the rare occasions I was, was overwhelming for me because I felt everything I felt
plus
what they felt too. If I spoke with someone who was having a bad day, I felt the anxiety of the person in my own stomach. The benefit of this was that I began to read people extremely well and I was much more compassionate than I had been. I noticed that people’s body language really did reflect their inner thoughts and predict their behavior. I not only sensed what they were thinking but also began to feel their feelings. If they were happy, so was I. Their discomfort became my own. Occasionally, after spending time with others, I had to retreat and go somewhere quiet and dark so I could rest from human encounters for a while.
    I learned that the new era of synesthesia research had begun despite the doubts of many medical researchers. Lawrence Marks, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, pioneered some of the earliest modern research in synesthesia in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Richard Cytowic, a professor of neurology at George Washington University, in Washington, DC, looked into it using emerging brain-imaging technology. Both of them mentioned in interviews that they had to persevere despite the misgivings of their peers, who initially found the topic too far out. The doctors ultimately found enough hard evidence in case studies to continue, and they are now considered the fathers of modern synesthesia research. They launched a new era of scientific inquiry into the phenomenon, and it continues in dozens of learning institutions and labs around the world.
    Before neuroimaging was widely available, Dr. Cytowic created several criteria to test people who claimed to have synesthesia. I read through the criteria and checked them against my own experiences. First, the ability must be automatic and involuntary. Check. Second, the images must be spatially extended, meaning perceived outside the body. That was certainly the case with mine. Third, the experiences must be consistent and simple. Well, mine were at least consistent. Fourth, the sensations needed to be vivid and memorable, even when recalled months later. That was also true for me, as I saw the same visions over years, not just months. And fifth, the perceptions needed to be experienced as real and undeniably true, causing an emotional response in the person experiencing them. If euphoria was an emotion, I could cross that element off the list with ease, I thought.
    I felt all of these points matched my own reality, yet I could not find any examples of synesthetes who saw the things I did.
    I kept searching for ways to verify and validate my self-diagnosis of synesthesia and eventually came across something called the Test of Genuineness (TOG). Developed in 1987 by a team of researchers including Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University in England, the TOG was designed to gauge how consistent a synesthete’s response to a specific stimulus was. For example, does someone who sees an
A
as red
always
see it as red? Or is it sometimes purple or navy blue? Does a person who sees emerald green when she hears an F-sharp
always
see emerald green with that note? Or does it change? To find out, people took the TOG and then retook it several months later. The researchers found that people who had synesthesia typically scored from 70 to 90 percent in consistency. Among the nonsynesthetes, consistency was usually between 20 to 38 percent. I knew the images I saw in response to numbers or equations were consistent over