voice+over+script

Narrator voice: Preshow: Synesthesia is a conscious peek at a neural process that happens all the time in everyone. What converges in the limbic system…is the highly processed information from the sensory receptors about the world, a multisensory evaluation of it. Narrator: Synesthesia is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes. Narrator: 1: Synesthesia is involuntary but must be elicited. Synesthesia is insuppressible. The external stimulus that sets it off is often easily identified, yet not everything will cause a synesthetic reaction. Narrator: It is the limbic system more than the cortex that reaches it greatest development in humans. It also happens to be most closely associated with those emotional and subjective traits we identify with humanity. Voice 1: Synesthesia is the most immediate and direct kind of experience I’ve ever encountered. It is sensual and concrete, not some intellectualized concept pregnant with meaning. It emphasizes limbic processes which break through to consciousness. It’s about feeling and being, something more immediate than analyaing what is happening and talking about it. Narrator: Six altered states that bear some similarity to synesthesia and are much more familiar to neurology are: (1) LSD-induced synesthesia, (2) photographic memory, (3) sensory deprivation, (4) temporal lobe epilepsy, (5) release hallucinations, and (6) direct electrical stimulation of brain cortex. Voice 2: In the light the photisms are faded ghosts of themselves. Narrator: ** // Through reason, you may deduce that there is a logic of emotion and accept the conclusion that it is the major force that guides your thinking and action. // **  Voice 3: Dark is not dark, it is thick with color, pattern and movement Narrator: there is more going on in our minds that we can ever consciously know. Voice 4: The colours are seen inside my mind. It's like another transparent layer of meaning seen simultaneously. Narrator: what people seek is not the meaning of life but the experience of being alive Voice 5: “I most often see sound as colors, with a certain sense of pressure on my skin. I have never met anyone else who saw sound. I’m not sure that “seeing” is the most accurate description. ** // I am seeing, but not with my eyes // **, if that makes sense. I can’t imagine being without my colors. Narrator: 2: Synesthesia is projected. The parallel sense that is triggered is usually perceived outside the body rather than “in the minds eye”. Voice 1: I hesitate telling those people who have to see to believe, for how can they see through my eyes? Voice 2: , at age 5, I asked some of the other kids about their colours for letters and numbers. They were outraged. They accused me of "making things up" and threatened to beat me up. I went home and asked my older sister. She didn't know what I was talking about so I shut up about it. Voice 3: I believe it is only now that science and the wider public are coming to an understanding of how much perceptual experience differs from person to person. Voice 4: I was left thinking that it was something that more people experienced, but it was somehow unacceptable to talk about it. I continued to remain quiet about it    Voice 5: The oldest criticism I had encountered against synesthesia being “real”, or even a phenomenon worthy of scientific attention, was that it was subjective. That it, it had no external manifestations. It was a condition knowable only through the reports of those who claimed to experience it. Narrator: 3: Synesthetic perceptions are durable, discrete, and generic. The associations of an individual synesthete endure for a lifetime. Voice // “The shapes are not distinct from hearing – ** they are part of what hearing __is__ **. Each note is like a little gold ball falling. That’s what the sound is. It couldn’t possibly be anything else.” // Voice 1: when we lose these senses, it is almost as if we have forgotten how to breathe. Narrator: 4: Synesthesia is memorable. The parallel sensations are easily and vividly remembered, often in preference to the stimulus that triggered them. Voice 2: I still encounter people who are outraged by the idea that perception can differ. They can get really angry about it. Maybe this is a frightening idea in some way. Voice 3: I realize that others have an inner life that they may or may not be in touch with. I don't expect others to act logically at all times. I don't expect others to understand themselves at all times. Voice 4: “The subject says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its content can be given in words. It follows from this that its ‘quality’ must be directly experienced, it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.” Voice 5: The solution to the medical mystery of synesthesia has profound implications for all of us Narrator: 5: Synesthesia is Emotional and noëtic. Synesthetes have an unshakable conviction that what they perceive is real. Their perceptions are accompanied by a “Eureka” sensation, the sense of the light bulb turning on that comes with an insight (the “this is it” feeling) Voice 1: Learning about the world is like this- watching and waiting for shapes to reveal themselves in the fog of our experience. Narrator: While the cortex contains our model or reality and analyzes what exists outside ourselves, it is the limbic brain that determines the salience of that information. Because of this, it is an emotional evaluation, not a reasoned one, that ultimately informs our behavior. Likewise all analogies of the mind to a machine are inadequate because it is emotion, much more than reason, that makes us human. It is the limbic brain, however, that decides questions of salience and relevance and so determines how we act on the information we have. It is an emotional calculation, not a logical one, that animates us Voice 3: I believe that synesthesia is actually a normal brain function in every one of us, but that its workings reach conscious awareness in only a handful…most brain processes operate at a level below consciousness. In synesthesia, a brain process that is normally unconscious becomes bared to consciousness so that synesthetes know they are synesthetic while the rest of us do not. Narrator: The fact that synesthesia is known to the smallest fraction of humanity does not mean that it is insignificant…I’ve never had such an experience, but I can still marvel at what my brain is capable of knowing. And I have to assume that it is capable of much more than what I am familiar with. I feel drawn to explore the possibility that all people may be capable of creating their own spectacular universes.