synesthesia: If you can taste with your eyes, see with your ears, or your body fills with animated shapes when someone makes a joke, you've got it. Most people who experience synesthesia simply strongly associate certain colors with particular letters or numbers. For instance, for me, the number four evokes a very particular color of green. In my experience, most synesthetes have never heard the word synesthesia, which could be one reason why scientists think there are so few of us.

I didn't know I had it until I was 29. While, on the one hand, it was exciting to at last have absolute validation from the gods of science for one of the many alternative phenomena I experience regularly in the confines of my perception, it was also lonely to discover that not only was my blue everyone else's green--it tasted different too.

But the extra limbic connections were exactly what made me feel that my body was a giant organ that was a receptor for joy. It explains my fierce connection to synthesizing seemingly disparate disciplines and to engaging the syntagmatic rather than the discrete. I'm not a big fan of divide and conquer. I'm wired that way.