The Taproot Podcast - 🧮🎨🧠Synesthesia: Blending the Senses to Distill the Soul

Starting point is 00:00:00 Music Hello everybody, it's Joel Blackstock with the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast, and today we're going to be reading an article called Synesthesia, Blending the Senses to Distill the Soul. Now, before we begin our discussion of synesthesia, or we even define it if you don't know what it is, we're going to consider this passage from a book called The Peregrine, which is one of my favorite books. It is a bird watching journal of a naturalist, which sounds boring as hell, but it is beautiful and it is a lot more than it seems. As Werner Herzog pointed out in his review, it is not a book about a person who is watching a bird. It

Starting point is 00:01:19 is about a person who is wanting to and maybe becoming a bird. But anyway, this is not a review of the Peregrine. It is an article on synesthesia, so I'm going to begin that reading from this book now. The first bird that I searched for was the nightjar, which used to nest in the valley. Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling out from a height into a deep and booming cask of wood. It is an odorous sound with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day, it would seem

Starting point is 00:01:52 thinner and drier, but dusk mellow it and give it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grape and almond and dark wood. The sound spills out and none of it is lost. The whole wood brims with it and then stops. Suddenly, unexpectedly, but the ear hears it. Still, a prolonged and fading echo, draining and winding out among the surrounding trees into the deep stillness between the early stars and the long afterglow. The night jar leaps up joyfully. It glides and flutters, dances, bounces lightly and silently away. Sparrowhawks were always near me in the dusk, like something I meant but could never quite remember. So let's sit for a minute with a couple things going on in that passage,

Starting point is 00:02:45 and you can speculate on why I might include it in an article about synesthesia. Oh, I lost my mic. Okay, there we go. So let's look at the things that is going on in this passage. So in the glare of day, it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk, mellow it and give it vintage. So the sound is being compared to the visual of a wine pouring into a cask. You also have him saying that the air and the quality of light change the way that the ear hears sound. The stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. He describes the sound as having a smell,

Starting point is 00:03:23 and the smell changing based on the color and the texture of light in the air the ear hears it and still a prolonged and fading echo draining and winding out among the surrounding trees or the ear heroes it hears it still sorry i'm not going to read the whole passage again but the perception of sound in the inner world of the mind endures after sensation of sound in the outer world has ended. It's implied because of a visual, because of what he's looking at. So what we're getting here is all of these senses blending together, or not blending together, which is, I think, how we think of synesthesia too often,

Starting point is 00:03:57 but the senses are influencing each other, and he is perceiving the way that they influence one another, and describing it beautifully. We don't know a whole lot about the author of the Peregrine if you haven't listened to it. It's a short read. It's a short audible. The narration on the audible I actually really like. It does the original justice. We don't know a ton about the author other than he watched birds. A lot of the poison that was in the air at that time, and pesticides were killing the Peregrine, so he thought likely it would not be alive. It is. It hasn't gone extinct. He thought it would not be alive much past his life, and we also know that he was probably suffering from some kind of illness that was probably lethal and probably what killed him. Other than that, we don't really

Starting point is 00:04:39 know a lot other than his house, which is still there. It's an interesting story. If you want to look up the peregrine, we're going to continue on with this article about synesthesia. So we know that we can't see sound and we know that we can't taste it. How does this podcast taste? You also can't smell it. How's my breath? You know, this description of birdsong tickles our other senses, even though we know those things are not a logical one. They're not even an intuitive one, but a metaphor that is kind of, you know, deep in the mind. It's not that it felt like this. It's just that these things are each other. You know, you might hear style writers describe colors or patterns as loud, or food writers describe taste as shining or dull.

Starting point is 00:05:25 And this is obviously, this is a synesthetic association, and since the writers are not talking about the food's ability to reflect light or make noise, synesthesia is when the senses blend. It's a condition that is a medical term, and it's a fascinating phenomenon where the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway triggers involuntarily another experience. So, you know, a lot of times people will describe synesthesia as that they ate mushrooms and then that mushroom made them eat the color yellow or smell what their friend was saying or, you know, speak a vision or something. And it isn't always just one sense is being used the wrong way. It is a deep commingling of the senses, um, that is kind of profound. And what I'm arguing in this article is not just, you know, a symptom,

Starting point is 00:06:16 but it's actually experiencing of the way that the deep brain works before our brain filters and puts all this stuff back together. So synesthesia is, you know, when it's, it can be a bad symptom and some people that want to get rid of it. But it also is not just a bad thing that is happening wrong. It is kind of us getting a little peek into the perception of the deep brain. And so, you know, there's a cousin of Charles Darwin and he coins the term synesthesia and he begins documenting various cases. But it is a very old phenomenon in our psyche. You know, synesthetic experiences, they've left traces throughout human history, so we know that this is something that goes back a long time. It's definitely not invented in Darwin's time. And manifesting, you know, they show up in ancient mythology, art, and religious practices. So the concept of rasa,

Starting point is 00:07:06 for example, in Indian aesthetic philosophy associates emotion with specific colors, taste, and musical tones. For example, the emotion of love is often associated with the color red, or the taste of sweet with certain kinds of round musical tone. And in the Greek world, the poet Sappho, there's a lot of references to synesthetic experience in her work and a lot of other Greek work in Latin. For one, you know, Sappho writes, as I listen, the faint scent of lemon trees rises in the sound of your voice. The poems of the Persian poet Rumi, who is a mystic that I like a lot, they often employ a synesthetic language that describes a spiritual experience. For example, Rumi writes,

Starting point is 00:07:54 The flute of the infinite is played without ceasing, and its sound is love. Whoever hears this sound merges into it. In the Bible, you also have a synesthetic description, taste and see that the Lord is good. This is probably not telling you to eat God. Here, the act of tasting is metaphorically linked with this experience of the goodness of God or the flavor of God.

Starting point is 00:08:21 And these ancient poets use these synesthetic-like associations to enhance this transcendental effect of their writing, as ancient poets use these synesthetic-like associations to enhance this transcendental effect of their writing, as we still use it today. You feel something a little bit different than if I was like, I saw a bird, the bird went in the sky, the bird had wings, the bird ate a worm. That is, you know, not what the peregrine is. The Hindu philosophy of chakras points, you know, it posits that there's this association and cross-activation between somatic experiences in different parts of the body. So chakras have a physical location in the body, like a somatic association, an emotional association, and then also a color. And then in other kinds of practice, there's also a link between different kinds of energy or sound frequency.

Starting point is 00:09:02 So they're kind of saying that like this sort of sound evokes this kind of emotion. That emotion is stored in this place in the body physically, and the body is also responding to this kind of color. So it's, you know, it is this kind of deep synesthetic, you know, fusion of senses that was used in ancient medicine and still today by some people. Chakras, you know, could have provided our ancestors with this framework to understand and regulate their physical and emotional well-being you know when they felt bad they knew that if they went and

Starting point is 00:09:30 they recognized the emotion of what what is it it's anger i'm going to look at red i'm going to feel this here i'm going to have this sound you know there was this way of kind of recognizing and regulating and rebalancing um so you know by linking specific emotions and bodily sensations to different energy centers represented by chakras, the individuals in the past might have been able to identify and address imbalances in their physical and emotional states. So the color association with chakras may also have served as this visual aid to enhance the focus and awareness of these energy centers during meditation and spiritual practice. You know, colors have a very strong psychological and physiological effect on

Starting point is 00:10:05 individuals, and using specific colors in association with chakras might have facilitated a deeper connection with activation of these energy centers. Synesthesia may have helped shaman and philosophers perceive these sensory associations. They were intuitive people. They could kind of get underneath cognition and experience it in a way that was a little bit more close to the bottom of the brain or, you know, more pure or more dissociated, whatever you want to call it. And then when they took these realizations out of that transcendental state, they were able to use them to help other people who did not have that heightened perception heal. You know, in the same way that, you know, most counselors are going to be intuitive feeler types that have a different, you know, background than somebody who goes into a different field. So, you know, in the same way that, you know, most counselors are going to be intuitive feeler types, uh, that have a different background than somebody who goes into a different

Starting point is 00:10:48 field. So, you know, synesthesia also has found a lot of expression in the works of, um, I like a ton of transcendentalist painters. Um, no one really knows about Emil Biestrom, um, which made his work really cheap until I found out about him about, you know, five years ago and really wanted to buy the stuff. Now it's tens of thousands of dollars. So I guess people are finding out about it. I have reproductions of some of that in my office. Um, that's, it looks a lot like Helma off Clint. Um, Wassily Kandinsky also is like a really interesting artist that does a lot of things trying to replicate cross sensory experiences. And I think he actually says synesthesia in one of them. So, you know, synesthesia has always been linked to this increase in neural plasticity, which is the

Starting point is 00:11:29 brain's ability to reorganize and establish new connections, which is a useful thing. But sometimes the experience of a very heightened plasticity is distressing. So, you know, it is a thought that it's thought that in individuals with synesthesia, there might be this heightened neural plasticity and certain brain regions and circuits can you know grow so fast that they grow over each other or knit together in a way that a more segmented uh brain as neural network would not you know highly intuitive people like poets or artists they might naturally be more able to form these synesthetic connections because you know the biggest neurological theory about why synesthesia happens that we have is that different uh percepture excuse me like sensory and perceptual networks in the brain are growing over each other or there's crosstalk between them so if you're

Starting point is 00:12:14 growing a whole lot of neural connections very quickly it would be more likely that that would happen um you know genetic factors and please don't send me an email and say that's not provable i know it's not provable. I'm speculating about things after reading a whole lot about what is neuroscientifically plausible, but has not yet been researched and maybe never will because there are so many variables and this stuff is something that we really can only speculate about. So genetic factors, you know, there are some genetic factors that show that synesthesia shows up in certain populations that also have these traits. So I think it's safe to make an assumption that maybe there is a relationship. You know, there's a recent advance in neuroscience that has shed a lot of light on these mechanisms.

Starting point is 00:12:56 And so a lot of fMRI studies have been able to see that there's this certain pattern of brain activity in people with synesthesia. And they indicate that synesthesia does involve like a hyperconnected and increased communication between different brain regions, which generally shows up in people who tend to be very intuitive and people who tend to have a very high neuroplasticity. And a lot of times those people also have other symptoms like dissociation and things that you would expect to go along with a lot of theta wave in the brain. So allowing for this crosstalk between sensory pathways is maybe one reason that that's happening, but there's a lot of different ways that we can, well, for lack of a better word,

Starting point is 00:13:37 have synesthesia without being diagnosed with synesthesia. You're not going to meet criteria for the diagnosis if you display some of these things, but I'm still going to say that they are related phenomenon that I'm going to still call synesthesia for the purpose of this article. So if you're on the podcast only, you're not on the blog having me read this to you, then you can't see these shapes. But there are two shapes. One is rounded.

Starting point is 00:13:59 It looks kind of like an amoeba, like a splatter. And another one of them has pointy points like a star you know and so there's a famous experiment that's replicated tons of times um where they ask people hey one of these shapes is named boo-boo and the other one is named kiki so which one is which most people um especially in the western world vast majority will say that the shape with pointy points is called kiki and the shape with rounded edges is called boo-boo because we have this uh that the shape with pointy points is called kiki and the shape with rounded edges is called boo boo because we have this uh that the the word that they call it they don't call it synesthesia but i think it's a related phenomenon um they call it sound symbolism is the

Starting point is 00:14:36 the phenomenon in the brain where different sounds are related to other senses like shape because we feel like there's a relationship but you know i can't tell you why that is. Like I can't get an Excel spreadsheet or something and show you that, but it just makes sense to my brain to say kiki is sharp because there's a, there's a consonant that is, uh, falls off faster when you have like a very sharp vowel and you also have a higher pitch. And those just things seem pointy to me. Where if I say boo, boo, boo, boo, that seems like a very round shape because the consonant, the vowel falls off the consonant at a much longer arc, which to me feels round. And there's also a deep, deeperness to it. There's a depth to the sound, not just that the pitch is lower, but that there's kind of a more of a roll. Your vocal cords are kind of almost harmonizing

Starting point is 00:15:25 on lower notes. And so there's something about that that feels bigger and rounder, but I can't tell you why. And most people, especially in the Western world, agree with me. So this is another phenomenon that I think is interesting. And so there's no logical basis. There's nothing that makes sense. We just know that brains sort of associate these. And when you think about it, I don't know, it makes sense to my brain but I don't know why. So you know in sound symbolism there's this tendency for people to perceive a correspondence between the sounds of words and the meanings or qualities of associated words. And so like for kiki and boo-boo that's names, but the sound properties of

Starting point is 00:15:59 a word can imitate kind of any object or action or concept. And so without going way into the woods, because a lot of these studies are done in different languages or across different languages, I don't speak a ton of languages. And so I can't sit and parse like all of this linguistics in these research articles, you know, super accurately. So you just have to believe me on all that or not. I won't say can't, I'm not going to do that. But the phenomenon has been observed across different languages and cultures. And so one thing that's kind of interesting is, for example, like many languages show this tendency to associate certain speech sounds with a size or shape. So words that

Starting point is 00:16:34 convey smallness or lightness often contain these high-pitched vowels. So it's not just the shape of the sound, it's actually the size. So it's not just a sharp angle for kiki, but people would think that boo-boo, like I was saying, there's more depth to that. There's more resonance. It's bigger. And that maybe is affected by the way that if I yell into a tiny box, it's going to have a higher pitch. If I yell into a big room, it's going to echo. And then maybe the feeling of depth, I don't know. But this pattern can be observed when you look at the way language is structured, because you have things like tiny or big versus light versus heavy. And you can feel the way that those words are structured with certain vowels based on the way that we perceive those vowels to appear, you know, to be seen in a visual way that, you know, sound doesn't do.

Starting point is 00:17:24 It's not usually a visual concept, but you know, sound doesn't do. It's not usually a visual concept, but you can see that assumption in language. So sound symbolism is this synesthetic phenomenon behind the association between the names Kiki and Boo Boo. But also there's like a lot of other examples where things have come like to represent smoothness, roughness, brightness, darkness, hardness. And then those same sounds show up in all these different languages. We have these sonic associations that can influence people's perception. And so when you're talking about that kind of crosstalk where this just makes sense, you know, to most people, and most people don't have synesthesia, like just because

Starting point is 00:17:58 you do sound symbolism, which is almost everybody or most people, that doesn't mean you have synesthesia. But I'm saying that it's normal for everyone to be a little bit synesthetic. And a bigger thesis of this is that the deep brain, all of these senses are mixed together. That's like how new neuroscience is saying that. And then it's taken apart and filtered before we can perceive it into this sensory data. But in that sensory data, the senses already kind of influenced each other on this unconscious level. You know, how exactly that happens or the implications of that, we're not going to get into all of it, nor could we probably. But my thesis here is that synesthesia is maybe representing the way that we think in the unconscious dimension in the subcortical brain,

Starting point is 00:18:39 and then later on the brain is refiltering that, and then there's some artifacts of that process filtering being left over. So these things do influence us. Color influences mood in a way that people talk about. But I still think we talk about it in a very abstract way. So, you know, in my article about architecture, several of them, I argue that there's this evolutionary basis for different forms of art and design, that we don't just design buildings randomly, that there's

Starting point is 00:19:05 something in it that makes a building timeless, and that that remains cross-culturally relevant. Additionally, recent studies have indicated that associations between taste and shape are different among cultural groups, which is interesting because it means that whatever that association between taste and shape is, it doesn't run as deep into the brain as the one with sound. So it's probably a newer neural network, and it's going to be different among cultural groups. Some of the other ones may have been there since the Stone Age, and other ones may have developed relatively recently. So they did a study in Africa, and they went and they had these different shape associations with taste, and they asked the people to basically draw the tastes in Westerners

Starting point is 00:19:44 and in these rural African tribes that hadn't been exposed to, you know, culture advertising or things where they would maybe have some sort of advertising association. They drew it totally differently. Mainly like sweetness and bitterness. They would draw to have different visual properties. So that's what's kind of interesting is like you could call these archetypes, I guess, maybe like the archetypes around taste need to be reprogrammed more readily because climate changes and environment changes or people migrate, whereas something other things change and it would make sense that taste is a more kind of culturally associated, uh, less universal, um, and less deep in the brain neural network.

Starting point is 00:20:31 So, you know, a research study that they conducted across a whole bunch of different, um, languages, English, French, German, um, shows that color metaphors to convey emotions like anger, sadness, envy, they had small variations, but usually not very big. So color is a lot more of a universal association than taste. And the networks in the brain that are needed to, you know, rewire and form these new associations between our senses and emotions, you know, this probably is pretty closely tied to instinct,

Starting point is 00:21:04 and it was relevant to keeping us alive as we evolved. Now, for example, we might associate colors like red or blue or orange with food if we eat a lot of blueberries and oranges and blackberries and raspberries. And then in an environment without those foods, our associations would need to change. So, you know, other colors or shapes would activate dopamine and taste receptors in a different way. And like I was saying before, some of those probably go a lot deeper into the brain and are harder to get rid of than the other ones that are sort of made to last for 10 years and then maybe be rewired. And so some of these associations between emotion and color and sensation, they run deeper into the brain based on how relevant the need for that association is. So, for example, the shape of a taste might be a relatively recent association due to culture and different genetic groups. It might be more genetic, like that one study would indicate from Africa.

Starting point is 00:21:57 And then associations with fire or sharp angles might have a much deeper neural pathway into the brain because they don't change. Poisonous snakes often have a very triangular pointed head. You can tell which snakes are poisonous by the shape of the head. Predators have sharp pointy teeth. As soon as people could make stone tools, they made pointy stuff to throw at each other or animals. And then prehistoric art usually portrays predators. Like if you look at cave art, I'm not going to try and remember or pronounce all those French caves where a lot of that art is. But it portrays like predators like wolves and bears with this triangular shape to the

Starting point is 00:22:37 head. And even like a shaman who's becoming like a buffalo person or a deer person, the way that they show that that person is a shaman, like a half animal is that the head is triangular. They're not human. They're an ant that part of them is animal. Um, so, you know, this prehistoric art, it, it portrays that shape a lot. And again, this is a theory that'd be hard to prove. It's just kind of a, uh, an idea, but it's possible that this is the reason that we think rounded shapes have more to do with people. You look at the first carvings, or not carvings, because there's bone picks and little knives and things. But the first carvings that were just made for art, just made for culture.

Starting point is 00:23:19 And a lot of people point to those as the beginning of religion in the old Stone Age. And these are made when mankind is still evolving. Like we're not modern humans yet. We're basically still primate monkeys that are changing. And the precuneus in the brain gives you this sense of self. And then all of a sudden people start trying to find out what to do with that. And we're going to do a longer series about that later. And all the problems that come from

Starting point is 00:23:45 perceiving that you are separate from nature, how those need to be handled with something like a religious or artistic or metaphorical practice. But when that happens, the first thing that people carve that is not a tool to keep them alive are these figures of women. And they're very round. You may have seen the Venus of Willendorf. If you've seen, it's not the oldest one, but it's one of the most famous. And if you've seen The Young Pope, it's really in the Austrian Museum where I've seen it, or I think the Viennese Museum. I forget the name of it. My wife would get mad at me. But anyway, that's where I saw it. That's, you know, Jude Law always be having this confrontation as the head of religion with the origin of religion. So he's this, you know, man obviously looking at this female figure that's in the corner of his office. And all of these Venus figurines are

Starting point is 00:24:32 almost spherical. They have a completely rounded head. They almost look like a rounded body. They have round breasts. They have a huge belly. They have like huge lobes of fat on their feet and on their thighs. And they're very much associated with this roundness. And so I think there may be, you know, a pretty deep and ancient association that the stuff that is chaos, that is bad, that is not us, that is not human, is pointy and sharp. And the stuff that is us is round and maternal and soft. And these Venus figurines, you know, of course we never know. It's a prehistoric, you know, there's no writing, but there's the ideas that they were sort of worshiping this idea of childbearing and the more children you could have in the woman as the bearer of children. And so the, they were somehow related to bringing about more children and more fertility. So these primitive humans associated themselves with that.

Starting point is 00:25:28 And there's, he cites it, it's from a 1970s study, Rhoda Kellogg did. But he cites it in Edward Edinger's book, Ego and Archetype, which is a really good book. He shows like children drawing the self from when they're like very little all the way up to when they get bigger. And in those drawings, uh, you see the origin, like the first drawings of self are just a

Starting point is 00:25:56 circle and then the circle gets bigger and more complicated. And then the circle is bifurcated with a cross and it turns into four parts. And Eddinger's using that in the book to have this theory that, you know, we can conceptualize the self and early religion as a circle because of our relationship to the sun and moon. That was the thing that we needed the most. We thought that they were most, we referenced ourself through them. You know, Jung was really into this idea. If you look in the Red Book, there's all of these scenes of like you know a sun disc being guarded on a boat or like a person killing a dragon and its blood has sun discs coming out

Starting point is 00:26:29 of it because most of the primitive religions were built around sun discs that was like the oldest part the first god was the sun god and it was around sun disc it's just a circle that usually is kind of gold or sometimes it's being anchored or held up by something like a snake. But you see that it's still, even in the later kingdoms in Egypt, but in the very early Egyptian artifacts, you see the sun discus being really primary. And so anyway, there's this kind of idea that when religion starts, people view themselves and God as just a circle, and then later God breaks into multiple parts and becomes this polytheistic thing that is more complicated as we become more complicated and our culture becomes more complicated. So the whole point of this is there might be a pretty

Starting point is 00:27:13 old association that's still present when children draw themselves at young ages, and you look at that art change, that people are human and round, and that we associate our humanity and our psyche with a circle. And we associate everything else with jagged, painful, predatory teeth and claws and sharp stuff. You know, we are boo-boo and the other thing is geeky. And so the synesthesia, you know, probably helps us listen to the pattern and shape of nature. And it's related to all these kind of evo-psych ideas and Jungian archetypal theory, you know, pointed heads of snakes, and colors, you know, indicated things that we needed to feel. And so, you know, this would

Starting point is 00:27:58 need to vary. The plasticity would need to change in different places. And so these studies have shown that there's cultural and genetic groups that have different associations between taste and shape. And then there's also an enormous difference between the information being processed by the brain and the information being perceived by the conscious ego. So especially one of the things that makes us very different than animals is that we're not just processing information.

Starting point is 00:28:29 We're actually aware of the information that we're processing. You know, perception in everyday life, like our senses constantly receive an enormous amount of information from the environment. And to prevent us from being overwhelmed, our brain filters out certain sensory inputs or the vast majority of sensory input, not certain ones. And that it deems less important or redundant, it puts some of them together, it processes them. You know, it's a pretty advanced algorithm. One example of that is eyes. video footage that your eye is taking at any point and plug it into a computer. Um, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:05 just like if you could make it have an HDMI cable or, you know, RCA cable set from the nineties or something, you plug it into the TV and you just look directly at what your brain, your eyes filming. Um, you wouldn't recognize it. I mean, one image is backwards and it flips the image to it's two images that your eye puts together, your brain puts together, both of your eyes, you know, input. And then it uses the binocularity to tell how far apart things are based on where they are, which is pretty complicated. But we could maybe assume that that's happening. But there's even more stuff that's really wild. One of them is that there's blood vessels and sometimes scar tissue or like different things, but definitely blood vessels that run right across the visual plane. So you can't see in certain areas, there's actually blind spots to your

Starting point is 00:29:49 vision. And what your brain is doing at all times is it's using the information around that, like a Photoshop dust removal filter to make a guess about that, what that was, and then sort of deinterlace it so you can't see it. So some of the stuff that you see is completely made up by your brain. And, you know, it happens to be right. Because, you know, we rely on it, and we don't perceive that. So you know, that information is being processed, but it's not being perceived. But there's a ton of information that's going on on the space level of the brain that you don't have access to, like, I can't sit here and be like, no, I, my breathing will turn off, you know, like, I will just not notice that I'm breathing if I wait a minute. And then I can't sit here and be like, no, I, my breathing will turn off. You know, like I will just not notice that I'm breathing if I wait a minute and then I can think about it and go, okay, well now I got to remember to breathe until I forget about it again. Then my body takes that over,

Starting point is 00:30:32 but I can't sit here and then say, okay, I'm going to, uh, try and perceive all the blood vessels and blind spots on my eyes and rip that thing apart and perceive the eyes, two different video feeds. And then like, I can't do that. So, you know, the closest thing that you can do is something called prisoner cinema, where if you close your eyes and you look at the blackness behind your eyes, there'll be all these sort of visual tricks that the processing does, and you'll see little blue sparks or whatever. But, you know, I'm going into the woods. But, you know, our brain doesn't show us all of the chaos that it is processing.

Starting point is 00:31:05 It only shows us what we need to be able to perceive ourself and the world around us. But that doesn't mean that there's not information in that processing where the senses are kind of blending and influencing one another. And things like brain spawning or ETT, color-based therapies, they're sort of hijacking those visual glitches in the brain in order to get trauma out of the body. So, you know, in individuals that have schizophrenia, you know, there's abnormalities in the brain, sensory gating. You know, we used to think that, it doesn't matter, I'm not going to go into the history of that, we used to have different theories about schizophrenia, but the common one now that sort of replaced those is that there's a sensory gating mechanism. It's not that the brain is making something up. It's not that the brain is making something up. It's actually that it isn't filtering something out, that everybody

Starting point is 00:31:50 else has, you know, this ability to discard all this information. But a person with schizophrenia, they can't tell it apart. And when I used to work with people, I still work with some people that have schizophrenia, but when I used to work only people only that had schizophrenia, you know, that was one of the things they would say is like, everything makes sense to me. And then I say this new thing, and that doesn't make sense to anybody. And they couldn't tell the difference in between what they were, you know, inventing eventually, essentially, and what everyone else assumed, you know, their reality was, you know, 90% the same as everyone else's reality. But then, you know, 10% of it wasn't there. And that's sort of true of everybody. We don't all live in the same perceived world, but we kind of know what things are mine. You

Starting point is 00:32:29 know, there's certain hobbies or ideas that I wouldn't just say on the podcast because they, you know, they may not be, I would know that they may be inflammatory or something, whereas somebody else, they don't have that. And it's not that their brain is making up something, it's that it isn't filtering things out. And a lot of delusion is active imagination or wish fulfillment. You know, a lot of psychosis is this unconscious creative process that is making things that are not being labeled as made up or not being discarded. And so the sensory gating theory of schizophrenia, I think, explains a whole lot about the thesis of what I'm trying to say about the way that synesthesia works in the brain. And so, you know, creativity and intuition in humans might be caused by gaps in these sensory gates that allow for unorthodox ways of information

Starting point is 00:33:19 being processed that end up to be useful. Most evolutionary advantages start off as an accident, and then they're useful, so they stick around. You get too much of it, and that becomes a problem again. For example, sickle cell anemia, the reason that that exists is that people who have the recessive gene for sickle cell anemia, they don't get malaria. The blood cell can't get messed with by this disease, but you have too much of it when you get the dominant one. All of a sudden, this shape of the cell is not different enough to protect you from the virus. It is so different that it can no longer go through your veins, and you're in a ton of pain. And so, you know, these small genetic predispositions to have an imperfect sensory gate,

Starting point is 00:34:06 they probably are part of what give us this ability to be creative and intuitive, especially in certain people. And then even in everybody, everybody's brain can be plastic up to a point. So if you start to concentrate on these things and practice creativity and practice intuition and practice mindfulness, then yeah, you start to perceive deeper and deeper layers of the mind. And so it would make sense that people who do those practices have better access to these things that sound a lot like schizophrenia. You know, it's long been speculated that schizophrenia might just be this overabundance or overexpression of the same genes that lead to creativity or new perspectives and new ideas. Creativity and intuition can help us see how to color outside the lines, but when there's too many of those tendencies to break rules, then we can't see the

Starting point is 00:34:55 lines at all. We don't even know that we're coloring outside of the lines. Joseph Campbell used to say that the artist swims in the ocean that the person with schizophrenia drowns. I think he actually said schizophrenic, but that's not person, patient-centered language. You can't say that anymore. It's, you know, person with homelessness, not a homeless person. It's person with schizophrenia, which is the right way to say it. But I'm just reading a quote, so if I change it, I want to explain why. So anyway, he, you know, meant there that the deep layers of the unconscious can enrich us, but if we go too deep, then we can lose ourselves.

Starting point is 00:35:29 Jung said that the ego has to go down into the unconscious, but if it goes down over and over too deep, then it loses its ability to have any kind of rigidity at all, and no longer is it too rigid. It isn't able to be rigid enough to keep the unconscious out. So our senses are not as distinct as we would like to make them. You know, we think about senses in this ordered way that the ear hears sound and the brain perceives the sound, but that's not really how the brain works. All of our

Starting point is 00:35:57 senses are blended together and they send messages to our body and emotional system before the brain stem filters them for us, you know, to be able to feel it. All of our senses are blended together and the brain filters them for us. And the ego consciousness and our self-perception is really one of the smallest parts of who we are. We think it's all we are. The ego wants to be all of who we are. But our brain does an enormous amount of work before the sensations that we perceive are presented to our ego on the silver platter to perceive. And the keys to unlocking our psychology, I think, lie in understanding synesthesia and the spaghettical bowl mess of processing and perception that is taking place in our brain at any moment. Treatments like somatic therapy or emotional transformation therapy, which I got trained in in Texas last weekend, use color and light. It's an eye therapy like brain spotting, but it doesn't use position. It uses color and

Starting point is 00:36:49 light. You can come in and see me and we'll do that. It's pretty wild. Now, you know, what is down there? You know, I watched a piece of paper turn black in front of me that my eyes knew was blue. And it's like, I know this is blue. What is going on? And I watched my eyes turn it black. And that was because I had a traumatic association with one of the emotions that we were working with. And so, you know, older traditions like chakras and transcendental meditation, I mean, they're based on utilizing these same glitches in perception. And while brain spotting uses eye position, EMDR uses eye movement and ETT therapy uses color as a trigger to release trauma from the deep brain. And I'm sure there's other ways in there to use the senses. But, you know, it's long been recognized that there's this powerful stimulus that can elicit emotion and psychological responses in humans within color.

Starting point is 00:37:38 We disagree on exactly where that comes from or exactly what it is. But we know that color influences us. You know, if it didn't at all, why would we have a preference about color when we bought clothes or painted our house? So there's this potential that color has to do a lot of things in the brain. And much of these happen at this base unconscious level before cognition, before we can even perceive what's happening, which is why we have a hard time understanding what they are or even believing that they're there. So from an evolutionary perspective, this impact of color on trauma and psychology can be explained by this principle of biophilia that we suggest,

Starting point is 00:38:13 you know, or biophilia says that humans have this natural tendency to try and connect with nature or compare themselves to nature. And then as we move further away from nature or natural principles, we become more healthy. And that doesn't mean that away from nature or natural principles, we become more healthy. And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't cook your food and you should go on a paleo diet and only eat nuts. It means that we've kind of evolved to do certain specific things for a reason. They kept us alive. And the more you try and bend human nature away from those things, the more problems happen. Now, you know, politically or philosophically or culturally, you have fights about what's natural and what's not.

Starting point is 00:38:46 So that's not what I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to argue for any sort of political position. What I'm saying is just that the more that you make people do things that they were not designed to do, the harder it is for them to do those things. Some maybe are good things that we should do, and then some maybe are bad things that we should not. I mean, one example, I think when you get into huge scale systems, like something like climate change, you are looking at something that is so big and so complicated and so many balls have to hit the next thing that we just, we understand systems on a one, two, and then very intelligent individuals can see things at a three and four step process. And then beyond that, we have to rely on something like equations or, you know, spreadsheets or, you know, these things that keep

Starting point is 00:39:30 track of complex logic for us. You know, AI is a pretty good example because what AI is doing is it's using the statistical engine to grab all these things on the internet. A ton of times, there's so many things that it grabs, it doesn't even know why it thinks that. You know, there's a court case that was brought against a county where they were using basically an AI that was a black box algorithm to try and predict if somebody was going to be a recidivist, if they were going to offend after they were let out of prison again. And so they were using it for parole and people brought a court case against it. And they said, you know, you can't do that because you're not able to tell me why you think that my client is a threat. And it, you know, it was upheld. They said, yeah,

Starting point is 00:40:08 we don't know. And neither does the AI. There's just too much information going through there, but it is right. You know, we've looked at it and the things that it's doing are correct. So we're going to go with what it says. You know, so climate change, I think is an example of what I'm saying here. Like that's maybe something where we should learn to do something that's not terribly natural, um, because we can't even understand the complexity of that issue and what it means enough to act on it because we're not designed to do that, do that. Um, and it means that there could be pretty big catastrophic consequences if we don't. Um, but you know, evolutionary psychology and archetypal theory, they propose

Starting point is 00:40:45 that certain colors have this deep-rooted symbolic meaning and they can evoke this archetypal response within you. And these archetypes are thought to be universal and inherited and represent fundamental human experiences and emotions. But for example, red can evoke passion or danger or energy, and blue may elicit calmness and tranquility and even sadness. And these archetypal associations with colors have developed over time as adaptive responses to the environment. So to talk about that ETT therapy, just real fast, you know, its use of specific colors and hypothetical mechanisms can be derived, you know, both, you can look at them, you

Starting point is 00:41:24 know, from a Jungian or evolutionary standpoint, but ETT uses this set of color filters that influence emotional states and facilitate therapeutic transformation. And from an evolutionary perspective, those colors and light directions that ETT is using, they may tap into these primal associations with where the sun is and what angle it's coming from and what color things are. That's probably where they come from. I don't think that our brain decided to do something that complicated at random, and I've seen it have some pretty profound effects. So, for instance, using calming shades of green or blue might activate this connection with natural landscapes and trigger relaxation responses and potentially reduce stress or trauma related symptoms. And then from a Jungian standpoint, the colors employed in ETT,

Starting point is 00:42:09 they might be chosen based on their archetypal symbolism. For example, like warm colors like red or orange could be utilized to activate this archetype of vitality or energy. And a lot of like chromotherapies that came out in the 70s, they did this, you know, some of them are a little bit crankier than others. Like they would say, like, you know, to be brave before you go into the interview, look at the color blue or something. And generally those have kind of fallen out of favor. If you think that that's what ETT is, it's not. ETT is using very specific frequencies and light directions to get a pretty profound reaction.

Starting point is 00:42:42 Like I said, I watched the color blue turn black in front of me and I'm looking at a piece of paper, but it's looking like a computer screen that can change color. And my brain is like, why, why is this happening? So if you want to see the spectral chart, if you're a therapist in the area, come by the office. I love to like show off how brain spotting and that stuff works. So you can see what it's like and see if you want to get trained in it. But now our brain filters these, this energy that we're talking about into five or, you know, some say six senses. Um, but it's really, you know, just electrical impulses and energy that could be filtered together and, and, and influence each other on the space level before it's processed. So, you know, synesthesia is this intriguing thing. Um, you know, if you're an artist or you're a scientist and it provides this window into

Starting point is 00:43:23 intricate workings of the brain on a pretty base level. But synesthesia is not the way we think. It's a byproduct of the way we think. And through understanding that, you know, we can understand ourselves and how to heal better and find new ways to kind of trick the brain into releasing all the trauma stored in the body that a trauma therapist is trying to get out. You know, if there is a path to our future models of therapy, I think it's through looking at something like this or understanding the brain in this way. So, you know, all of our senses come from this giant stew pot

Starting point is 00:43:53 that the brain must filter into specific ingredients afterward. It's not making a stew out of the ingredients. It's pulling ingredients out of a stew. But they've already marinated and they've already influenced each other and the taste of one another is on them. There's some of the bone in the carrot and there's some of the onion in the olive or whatever. That's a gross stew. But whatever. I mean, the stuff is steeped in each other and then we're pulling it out to perceive it. And so I think by looking at that mechanism that what I see influences what I taste, influences what I feel, and influences what I say.

Starting point is 00:44:26 And then, of course, emotion is going to influence cognition. But emotion has already been colored by senses and the body before you even got to mood, and then cognition comes last, and a language-based thought comes last. All this stuff has taken place first. And so if we're going to make a non-cognitive therapy that kind of goes deeper into the brain, this is the way I think about it, and this is kind of an open-ended thought. But accepting all the depth and complexity that's beneath cognition, I think, can help us get a better sense of what makes us human.

Starting point is 00:44:57 And it's very late. I'm very tired. So here's a little joke before we go. There's a guy, and he points at a man on the train and he says under his breath to his friend, hey, I heard that guy has synesthesia. The guy with synesthesia turns around and is like, hey, I smelled that. Anyway, have a good night. And if you want to try ETT therapy, come by Taproot. Talk to you soon.

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The Taproot Podcast - 🧮🎨🧠Synesthesia: Blending the Senses to Distill the Soul

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