zeitvox replied to your post: The Real Sixth Sense
What if any number of enumerated senses unfold out of an “Ur sense”? Something like that, something that might make synaesthesia conceivable in retrospect.
According to these scientific accounts, a lot of synaesthetic outcomes have been born out of rehabilitation processes. The most interesting of the two, I think in particular, were the case of the woman who was perpetually falling and the man blind from birth. The woman's inner ear was damaged so much that she could not stand up straight for more than a short period of time without starting to wobble. They corrected the process by using a device that sent a series of electrical pulses to her tongue, creating a make-shift inner ear. Thus, over the span of more than sixth months, her sense of "taste" (as one might call it) helped recover the sense that her inner ear at one time had. The man who was blind from birth had a similar process done with the hands and legs, where a series of electrical pulses were sent to him when various air pressures were changed in front of him. His body was able to, in a way, map out the world in front of him by showing him directional shifts due to both light and air. When doctors corrected the damage done to his retina at birth, his eyes (over a span of several months) were able to adjust to the world quickly for the first time because his sense of touch had already seen for him.
Doctors in this field are convinced, really, that our sense of audition (hearing) is actually what attributes to our sense of sight. Though it is not as acute as say a dog, it helps us generate a field of relative distance that sight might otherwise be confused or map out incorrectly (overlapping three-dimensional concepts like a horizon with a building on it). Like I mentioned in the post with the ferret, the two senses are relatively synonymous in the brain, though the eyes tend to pick up more of the information arrayed by the world in an evolutionary context.
