[pessimizer]

People claiming that weird unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful) inner states give them magical powers has got to stop being respected.

Thinking 4 is red doesn't mean that you don't have to count anymore. It's as stupid of a claim as claiming that "hearing colors" allows people to see in the dark.

I'm a very, very fast minesweeper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game) ) player, and I play in a non-marking style (meaning I just click where mines aren't rather than bothering to mark where mines are.) I realized one day that I subjectively see the spots that I know don't have mines as differently colored than the ones that I know do. That does not mean that I am not doing the calculations in my head, it just means that they are so reflexive that I don't notice them. Because I am trying to clear as fast as I can, I've seen every pattern thousands of times, and my feedback is visual, there's a ghostly sort of visual marking showing the outcome of my calculation.

This is similar to how people echolocate and have no idea that they're echolocating: "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation" https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

We are not necessarily aware of what we are applying complex logic to, even when it requires delicate timing and swings wildly over tiny differences. I'd go even further and say that we are necessarily less aware of calculations that we are making quickly, because being quick does not allow time for reflection.

You've just gotten good at finding 4-leaf clovers because you spend an enormous amount of time looking for 4-leaf clovers.

[pturing]

Start with these:

Eagleman DM, Kagan AD, Nelson SN, Sagaram D, Sarma AK (2007). A standardized test battery for the study of Synesthesia. Journal of Neuroscience Methods. 159: 139-145

Ward, J., Simner, J., Simpson, I., Rae, C., Del Rio, M., Eccles, J. A., & Racey, C. (2024). Synesthesia is linked to large and extensive differences in brain structure and function as determined by whole-brain biomarkers derived from the HCP (Human Connectome Project) cortical parcellation approach. Cerebral Cortex, 34(11)

Tomson SN, Avidan N, Lee K, Sarma AK, Tushe R, Milewicz DM, Bray M, Leal SM, Eagleman DM (2011). The genetics of colored sequence synesthesia: Suggestive evidence of linkage to 16q and genetic heterogeneity for the condition. Behavioural Brain Research. 223(2011):48-52

Tomson SN, Narayan M, Allen GI, Eagleman DM (2013). Neural networks of colored sequence synesthesia. Journal of Neuroscience. 33(35):14098-106.

[pturing]

> unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful) inner states

One of the great things about Synesthesia is that it is one of those places where we have in fact been able to study some really interesting things about perception by connecting it to external objective measures.

We've been able to do this most of all with psychophysics testing, but in recent years we have also been able to connect this with genetics data and neural data via fMRI.

[tokai]

Synesthesia is not well understood but it is a falsifiable phenomenon, and the medical consensus is very much that it exists.

[pessimizer]

Counterpoint: it is not a falsifiable phenomenon, and there is no medical consensus that it exists.

[iansteyn]

Source? Or is this satire

[pturing]

If you want to find academic sources arguing against the possibility of measuring and confirming synesthesia or denying its existence, you'll want to dig back to the 1970's. It's not a tenable position in the 21st Century.