Unthinkable

by Helen Thomson

  A slight, handsome thirty-two-year-old with brown eyes and a soft voice, Joel grew up in Miami, with Nicaraguan parents who had come to the United States seeking asylum. He lived in a Spanish household, learning English from watching TV. His childhood was relatively straightforward, although there were times when people might have mistaken his precociousness for autism. In fact, unlike many children with autism, he didn’t find it difficult to empathize with others or to understand their behavior: he knew only too well what other people were thinking or feeling—because whatever they felt, he felt it too. A scratch of the head, a frown, a slap on the wrist—if he saw it, he felt the same sensations on his own body.

  * * *

  Have you ever watched a painful tackle on the football field and felt a twist in your stomach, or felt sad at the sight of someone upset? If so, you have experienced empathy. It’s generally something we cannot avoid; the thoughts, feelings and physical movements of others subtly leak into us, affecting our own thoughts and behavior. It’s a fundamental component of human society—one that we are typically unaware of, and that relies on a complex system of mirror-like activity in the brain.

  In 1992, Giacomo Rizzolatti, an Italian neurophysiologist at the University of Parma, and his colleagues discovered a group of neurons in the brain that fired in the same way both when a monkey was grasping a peanut and when it was watching a researcher grasp a peanut.1 These “mirror neurons” were first identified in the premotor cortex—a region responsible for planning and coordinating actions—and later in other areas of the brain, such as those that process our sense of touch.

  What makes this mirroring special is that when we see someone performing an action or making a face, we don’t just see their actions—our brain, in a sense, feels them too. It is thought that this enables us to internalize another person’s actions as if we are the agent in charge of those actions. Over the past twenty years, the existence of mirror neurons in humans has been validated in a number of studies,2 and they have been described as the driving force behind our great leap forward in human evolution. They are considered by many to be vital to our ability to understand and interpret the actions of others, and to empathize with another person’s mental state.

  For most of us, this mirroring takes place under the radar. It allows us to empathize with but not literally feel what another person is experiencing because signals from other areas of the brain allow us to distinguish between things that happen to us and things that happen to others. But some people’s mirroring mechanism is unusually active, which results in them experiencing tactile sensations and emotions from seeing those same sensations happen to other people. These can be so sudden and so strong that they are sometimes indistinguishable from the real thing.

  The condition is called mirror-touch synesthesia. It differs from other kinds of synesthesia that we have seen earlier in that it can have far more visceral results. The first mirror-touch synesthete was discovered by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist at University College London. Blakemore was delivering a lecture in which she mentioned anecdotal accounts of people who could feel other people being touched on their own bodies. At the end of the lecture, a puzzled woman in the audience came up to her and said, “Isn’t it normal to feel other people’s touch?”

  In a paper subsequently published in the journal Brain, Blakemore reported that she had scanned the woman’s brain and showed that her mirror neuron system was much more active than in other people of her age when she observed touch.3 In the same paper, Blakemore also describes a man who had suffered a stroke that resulted in paralysis and loss of sensation to the left side of his body. When his body was hidden from view, he was unable to feel any kind of tactile sensation. However, as soon as he was able to see his body being touched, he claimed he was able to feel the touch. It was the first sign that tactile stimulation isn’t always necessary for us to perceive the sensation of touch—in some conditions vision alone is sufficient.

  I was desperate to know what it was like to experience such a condition, so one freezing morning in January, hours before a blizzard buried much of the East Coast of America, I traveled to Boston to meet Joel. Joel had experienced mirror-touch synesthesia for as long as he could remember, but what is most remarkable about his story is his career choice. He is a doctor, which means that he spends the day sharing the sensation of painful injuries, turbulent emotions and even death.

  * * *

  Joel and I are seated in the gigantic lobby of what was once the Charles Street Jail. Famous for housing Malcolm X, the prison was one of Boston’s most iconic landmarks. Now transformed into the three-hundred-room Liberty Hotel, the building has retained a lot of its chilling charisma. Each floor has wrought-iron railings, which overlook an opulent central rotunda. Each prison wing now hosts guests who can afford to pay top dollar for such a well-located hotel.

  There is something reassuringly familiar about Joel. He is smiley and genuine and an easy conversationalist. Each time I laugh, he laughs too, he is self-deprecating and eloquent and all the things that make you immediately want to be someone’s friend. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised, since Joel’s ability to understand my feelings is far beyond that of a normal stranger. If I were to place my hand on my lap, Joel would feel the sensation of a hand on his own lap. If I bite my lip, he feels a tingle in the same spot. If I were to push a coin along my arm, he’d feel the flatness running along his arm. If I were to poke my leg with a toothpick, he’d feel the pointedness on his leg. He describes the feeling as an imperfect replica of the real thing, “an echo of a sensation.” But it’s not just other people’s touch that Joel can feel, but their emotions, too. When he sees someone looking puzzled, he too feels confused; if someone’s angry, the emotion boils up in him as well.

  Settled into some comfy sofas in the corner of the lobby, Joel and I order coffee. I ask him to take me back to his childhood.

  “Sure,” he says. “I’d probably have been described as an emotionally precocious and hypersensitive kid.”

  He wasn’t aware of his mirror-touch synesthesia growing up but, looking back, he believes it definitely had an influence on his behavior. He preferred to hang out with adults rather than children, for a start.

  “I think it was because I could take on board their emotional experiences,” he says.

  “So you absorbed their emotions and enjoyed feeling what adults were feeling?”

  “Yeah, I think that must have been it. It wasn’t just the happy, sad, scared, angry emotions that you mainly think about as a kid. When I was around adults, I could experience all these other emotions—intrigue, distance, impetuousness. They’re words I wouldn’t have known at the time, but now I can reflect back and know that I was having that emotion. Experiencing the breadth of their emotional palette was so much richer than feeling what the kids my age were feeling.”

  In high school Joel tended to talk about other people’s emotions—often when they didn’t want to discuss them. They would find it really violating, he says.

  “Eventually I learned not to do that. I learned to gauge when the time was right to talk about how they were feeling and when to lead them to believe that I didn’t have any knowledge of their emotions. It was a bit Clark Kent-ish: I put on the glasses and was just like everyone else.”

  ALTHOUGH I COULD UNDERSTAND why mirror-touch synesthesia allowed Joel to experience other people’s sensations of touch, it was difficult to understand why he felt their emotions too. It wasn’t just that he more easily interprets what emotion someone is feeling, he literally feels the same emotion as the people around him.4 If he doesn’t remove himself from the situation or focus his thoughts on something neutral, he can go for hours experiencing an emotion that has no relation to his own state of mind.

  Joel explains: “I feel the emotions of others because of the postures that people take on, the facial expressions that they wear, the micro-movements that they do without even being aware of it—those are all felt on my own body
.”

  So although Joel’s face doesn’t literally move when he sees someone else smile, his brain activity is mirroring the kind of activity that happens when he does smile, which makes him feel like he is smiling, which subsequently triggers a feeling of happiness. Here we’ve stumbled back upon Antonio Damasio’s work—that at the heart of our emotions are bodily sensations.

  “I wear what you wear on my body,” says Joel. “And that in turn sends a message to my brain that this is the experience I am having. So if someone looks angry, then my brain will feel those movements as if they are happening to my own face and say, ‘You’re angry.’”

  Joel discovered this extraordinary ability when he was in his early twenties. It actually began with the revelation that he had grapheme-color synesthesia. He was in India on a medical school trip when his group started talking about meditation and his friend Elliot mentioned that there were people who can see letters and numbers as having colors and that they apparently had an easier time getting into a meditative state.

  “I thought to myself, ‘Why did he mention that?’” says Joel, taking a sip of his coffee. “Like, why would that be a noteworthy thing to mention? In my mind, that’s just being a person, just being human.”

  He took Elliot aside and asked him whether seeing numbers with color was normal.

  Elliot broke it to him gently. “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

  “And that was my first insight into the fact that I had synesthesia,” says Joel.

  It was only when he was participating in a trial of synesthetes at Vilayanur Ramachandran’s lab in California that he discovered that anything else was amiss. The researchers had asked him all sorts of questions before moving on to talk about his mirror-touch synesthesia—assuming that he knew what it was and that he had it.

  “I had this moment of ‘Oh, right, so not everyone has this either?’ It was genuinely like this light dawning on me.”

  He says he now has a humbling sense of uncertainty about his perceptions.

  “Now I share my experiences a lot more and just have to take a hit when someone says, “Yeah, everyone has that, that’s not unique.” It’s quite comforting when I check about the way I perceive the world and somebody says, ‘Yeah that’s normal!’”

  As well as grapheme-color synesthesia, Joel also experiences the perception of numbers when he looks at people. Not only that, but each of those numbers has a distinct personality.

  “So do the personalities of the numbers represent the personalities of the people?” I ask, when he brings this up.

  “I haven’t tested it objectively to be sure,” he says, “but my hunch is that it’s quite accurate.”

  I’m intrigued. I thought I’d heard of every kind of synesthesia, but this one was new to me.

  “So how many numbers and personalities are there?” I ask.

  “Each number is a small collection of personality traits, almost like a person, so when I meet someone they might have aspects of lots of numbers.”

  I’m confused, which he immediately senses.

  “Look, I can show you,” he says. “For you, the most prominent number that I see is the number eight, then there’s a couple of ones, with a few zeros. There’s also a bit of nine in the background.”

  “Okay, so what kind of personalities do those numbers have?” I ask.

  Joel smiles. “Well, it’s hard to describe my subjective perception with the full richness it deserves, partly because it’s difficult and partly because I have this scientist in me that’s also kind of rolling its eyes. But here goes. So the numbers all have colors. The eight is this bright yellow, a vibrant banana yellow. One is this butter yellow and zero is one of my favorite numbers—it’s a clear, brilliant white, and has like a hint of iridescence to it.”

  “So I’m iridescent and translucent,” I laugh, thinking back to Rubén’s description of my aura.

  “Eight is like a hardworking, strong, earnest person with true intentions. Number one is also true, but can have a competitive edge.”

  My family would definitely say that bit was spot on, I think. “I feel like I’m getting my palm read, Joel.”

  “Well, yeah, I mean this is the basis of cold reading, right?” he says, continuing with his description. “Nine is a very black number—it’s what I associate with an executive, high-powered person. Someone who is firm in their actions and can command a room if they want to. And the zero that I see has this Zen, calm neutrality to it.”

  Needless to say, I find it pretty disconcerting to have someone sum up my personality, having known me for less than fifteen minutes. But to some extent it is what we all do. We judge the people we meet instantaneously, sum them up in our minds, box them into categories of who we think they are. Most of us just don’t have it all painted out quite so clearly; more often these judgments are a murky instinct that we would perhaps refer to as gut feeling.

  “Do people’s numbers change?” I ask Joel.

  “It’s kind of like focusing an image,” he says. “The more data I gather about a person, the more the image will refine and numbers will be added in different places and sizes and then when I know someone well enough, it becomes a landscape made up of the colors of the numbers it represents. One friend, for example, is this turquoise lagoon in a gray crater, because he has a lot of aspects of seven, four, some sixes, rare zeros, but a lot of seven, which makes up most of the water.”

  “What traits does seven have?” I ask.

  “Seven is an endearing kind of weirdness. Like someone with a slight quirkiness, you know? But you just gotta love ’em!”

  “Do you see numbers when you look at your own reflection?”

  “Yeah, it’s not exactly a number. It’s like an experience of shining a flashlight at a mirror, kind of like a bright light without any additional information to guide me. The closest number I could pin it to is zero. I’d like to say I see fours, but it’s probably more the desire to see four because it has characteristics that I want to emulate in myself. It’s like a calm, soothing, friendly number. A gentle storm before the rain rolls in.”

  “Do you think the colors and numbers you see in other people influence your opinion of that person?” I’m thinking about the trouble that Rubén sometimes has separating the two.

  “Yeah. When I was younger, I’d have reactions to people that were associated with these perceptions and it would turn me off or on to them. But as I gained a lot more awareness of the process, I’ve also been able to gain more objective distance and now ask myself, ‘Does this make sense? Is this my implicit bias? Is my discomfort with this person because they have a lot of five? Should I be giving the three a little more benefit of the doubt?’”

  “Do you ever ignore the numbers completely?”

  “Sometimes, but I find that I actually tend to get burned more for ignoring the associations. It’s almost like looking under the hood of intuition. And to ignore it, you’d also be ignoring your instinct.”

  I look around the lobby. There are people milling around, heading in and out of the hotel and sitting drinking coffee, working on their laptops. I wonder just how far Joel’s sensations actually reach. Can he feel what these people are feeling? I ask Joel to describe a snapshot of his world right here and now. He snatches a glance at the three people seated nearby on a long sofa. “I can feel the flatness of the phone that woman had against her cheek,” he says. “And then the man next to her sort of did this shrug where his head went into his neck.” Joel dips his chin into his neck. “I felt his double chins on my chin. And then did you see that woman rushing past? I felt her hair on the back of my neck, the way it was brushing back and forth.”

  I was about to ask Joel how on earth he gets anything done when he feels so much of the world around him, when he surprises me yet again.

  “You see that there,” he says suddenly, pointing to a long, thin vase sitting in the middle of the table between us. “I feel that on my body too.”

  “You feel inanimate o
bjects?”

  “Yeah, if I look at it I can feel the length of its neck in my neck.” He stretches his head upward. “It feels like my neck is elongated, holding my head up high.

  “Sometimes, I’ll get irritated and angry and I’ll look around and notice an object that was in my peripheral vision that resembles an angry face and be like, ‘Oh right, it’s because of that.’”

  * * *

  We all begin mirroring others at an early age. Poke your tongue out at a newborn baby and you’ll see what I mean—they’ll poke their tongue right back at you. We inadvertently mimic people in others ways too. The former UK prime minister Tony Blair was famous for being a linguistic chameleon, changing his accent to suit his audience. In fact we all have a tendency to imitate other people’s accents, as well as their facial expressions, body language and mannerisms. Some studies suggest that people respond more warmly to those who subtly imitate their movements. This unconscious mimicry acts as a kind of social glue: if our body language is alike, then our mental states must also be similar. A word of warning, though: consciously trying to imitate someone to make them like you can divide your attention and you’ll likely end up with the opposite result.

  Despite all this mimicry, few of us have to make a serious effort to distinguish what happens to other people from what happens to ourselves. Yet Joel’s brain seemed to have difficulties separating the two. To find out why, I paid a visit to Michael Banissy, a neuroscientist whose office in Goldsmiths College was just a few miles from my home in southeast London. His lab works closely with all kinds of people who have difficulties with social perception, trying to understand how these abilities vary between us. He has scanned the brains of several people with mirror-touch synesthesia, including Joel, and thinks he knows what drives their strange perceptions.

  Brain scans show that the mirror neurons in mirror-touch synesthetes are overactive when they see other people being touched. It’s likely that there is some kind of threshold that you have to reach to become consciously aware of a tactile sensation, and that people with mirror-touch synesthesia cross over this threshold when merely looking at other people.5