THE BEST OF: The Doctor Who Can Feel His Patients' Pain
It’s one of the most fascinating conditions of the human mind. For some otherwise ordinary people, a rare glitch in the brain can unlock extraordinary abilities. Imagine being able to experience the physical sensations of the person next to you, even detecting their emotions, the good and the bad. That’s exactly what Dr. Joel Salinas can do. He’s a doctor who can feel his patient’s pain, and he was born with the neurological condition Mirror-touch Synesthesia. In this interview, Dr. Salinas sits down with Dr. Oz to reveal what he calls “the secret life of the brain.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I see this person who's on the floor, and I'm feeling the sensation of the floor up against my back.
I'm feeling the compressions against my chest as he's getting compressions.
I feel a sharp sensation down the back of my throat as a breathing tube is being placed down his throat.
And at the moment they call the time of death, I just distinctly remember this feeling of, it's as if all motion in my own body has stopped, and I have to will myself to breathe.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
It's one of the most fascinating conditions of the human mind.
For some otherwise ordinary people, a rare glitch in the brain can unlock extraordinary abilities.
Imagine being able to experience the physical sensation of the person next to you, even detecting their emotions, the good and the bad.
That's exactly what my next guest can do.
He's a doctor who can feel his patient's pain.
Dr. Joel Salinas was born with a neurological condition called mirror-touch synesthesia, something I've heard a lot about but I've never talked to anybody with it.
And he's here with us right now to reveal what he calls the secret life of the brain.
And it does, I must say, for everybody, sound like a superpower of sorts.
It's a mystical connection between one person and another.
But, Joel, if you don't mind, explain what it's like living every single day With this uncanny ability to really feel, literally, what other people are experiencing.
Yeah, I think the easiest way for me to explain what mirror touches would be for me to say that what I see somebody else feel physically, emotionally, my brain makes me feel too.
So if I see someone gasping for air, I feel in my body like I'm gasping for air.
If I see someone with a headache, I feel like I have a headache.
It's like this mirror touch experience makes me categorize the people I'm looking at as if they were me, essentially.
So as an example, if I walk into the hospital, I see somebody sitting in a wheelchair, I feel as though the leather of the wheelchair is behind my legs.
Or if they're wearing a pair of glasses, I feel the sensation of glasses on the bridge of my nose.
If I see the security guard with a little kind of a plastic kind of coiled earpiece around his right ear, I actually feel it in my left ear.
My brain is constantly kind of seeing people and thinking they're my reflection or I'm their reflection based off of the situation and all of my past experiences.
So you're a neurologist.
Yes.
So ironically, it's exactly the space that you need to be an expert in to understand what this anesthesia is.
Explain it to everybody.
How does this happen?
And especially this mirroring part of it.
Yeah, synesthesia, if you break it up, it's sin and anesthesia.
Sin meaning together, anesthesia meaning sensation.
So it's the blending of the senses, essentially.
And that can happen in all sorts of different ways in people.
About four out of a hundred people have this experience of synesthesia.
Four out of a hundred?
Yeah.
Oh my goodness.
Are there varying degrees?
Absolutely.
Yeah, you tend to see a lot more of it in people who have autism, and it's just how the brain cells are connected to each other, and some people just have a lot of extra wiring.
But it can be connected in strange ways where sounds can give you the sensation of visual experiences like colors and shapes, which is one of the reasons why you see it a lot in celebrities who are musicians as well, like Billy Joel, Pharrell, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Lorde.
These are all people who have synesthesia of one form or another.
Now mirror touch is really interesting because it's essentially sight to touch.
So we all have a mirroring system in our brain where we see people move, get touched, or experience pain.
Our brain is creating almost like a 3D virtual reality type simulation below the level of consciousness.
Which is believed to be kind of at the root of things like empathy and understanding other people's intentions.
So that experience can actually cross into your conscious awareness when it's really extreme.
So imagine you're watching a football game and you see someone get, boom, sacked all of a sudden.
That cringe feeling you get is essentially that mirroring system being so heightened that you feel as if it was happening to you.
But for 1.6% of the population, or about 200 people who have mirror touch, that experience is conscious all the time.
Because this mirroring system is hyper-hyperactive because of this connectivity.
Doesn't it make it impossible to watch a football game?
Someone's getting hurt all the time.
Yeah, it's interesting in that I consider myself kind of one of the lucky people with Mirror Touch in that I've been able to use Mirror Touch as if it were an ability to help other people.
Most people who have Mirror Touch are actually shut-ins.
There's this one woman who has Mirror Touch and she has kind of locked herself in her home, doesn't really communicate with other people.
She doesn't even own a dining room table because she can't stand the sight of seeing other people eat.
And other people with mirror touch, why they might not be shut-ins, they require long periods of isolation just to offset these overwhelming sensations.
And for me, I think one of the things that's really motivated me as a doctor is that I get to help other people feel better and helping them physically feel better, I also get to feel better too.
So it's like being totally selfish and selfish at the same time.
Well, you have a beautiful book called Mirror Touch, again by Joel Salinas, who's our guest today, A Memoir of Synesthesia and the Secret Life of the Brain.
And in here, you talk about some of the challenges of practicing medicine.
And I can see why it'd be great if you're a doctor who can feel your patient's pain.
We always aspire to be able to do that, certainly when we're teaching doctors, which we wish more could do that.
But it's not so good if you're watching someone vomiting or dizzy or having intractable pain.
Do you feel exactly what they're going through?
Yeah.
So at the beginning of my medical training, like in medical school, that was where I had a lot of challenges in that area.
Just...
Seeing other people suffering and then having to manage the feelings in myself as they were being recreated.
And this was before I was even really, really aware of what synesthesia was.
I just thought that I was hypersensitive.
But seeing someone die for the first time, for example, that was just so intense.
As a medical student, I remember I'm sitting kind of in the workroom with one of the supervising doctors and an alarm goes off for a cardiac arrest.
We run out of the room.
It just so happens that someone's collapsed in the waiting room nearby.
As I walk into the room, I see this person who's on the floor...
And I'm feeling the sensation of the floor up against my back.
I'm feeling the sensation of compressions against my chest as he's getting compressions.
I feel a sharp sensation of an object going down the back of my throat as the breathing tube is being placed down his throat.
And at the moment where they call the time of death, I just distinctly remember this feeling of it's as if All kind of motion in my own body has kind of stopped, and I have to will myself to breathe.
And at that point, I had to head out of there.
I went to the bathroom.
This threw up.
And it took me a while to compose myself and stare at my reflection in the mirror and just remind myself that this is my body, this is where I am, that I'm not dead.
But for me, it was really about not avoiding the situations but exposing myself to as many intense situations as possible because I knew that the best way that I could help patients is to be both mentally and physically and emotionally present for them and that meant getting used as best as possible to all these experiences.
And now, now that I'm much further along, now I've finished all of my clinical training.
I'm a supervising neurologist now.
It can still be intensive sometimes, but I've kind of figured out kind of how to manage it.
I'm so curious, and I bet a lot of the folks who are listening to us are as well, is whether they have an element of this.
You see, 4% of us have mere touch synesthesia.
The 4% is just the cross-wiring of the senses, and 2% specifically is just mirror touch.
Alright, so again, if it's 4, it's 1 in 25 people have some element of this.
But I would think that it's not binary, right?
It's not you have it, you don't have it.
It's probably a cascade.
I'll give you an example.
I know that there's literature around people who see colors during orgasms.
Which, I don't know if that's 1 in 25 too, but hopefully it's more.
You can imagine different physical actions.
A runner's high.
When you know you have endorphin release, so maybe it frees you a little bit to be able to actually sense and see in your colors instead of the pain in your feet or whatever, however it manifests itself.
So do most people listening right now probably have some element of this?
It just might be confined to a very small spot, and maybe it's the opposite, which is only a few percent of us have none of it.
You're absolutely right.
I think of it as like a spectrum.
So this kind of hard wiring and programming of this mirroring experience isn't everybody.
It just so happens that some people are so extreme that they can kind of be tested in a laboratory as having this mirror touch kind of label.
But so many of us fall along that spectrum in lots of different places and some of us in particular are very close to that mirror touch experience.
Like you people talking about they walk into a room and they take on the negativity of the room.
Those are people who are highly, highly empathetic but may have a much more active mirroring system in their brain compared to other people.
It's a component of biology and also a willingness to take on these experiences of the people that you're seeing that makes it so vivid.
And what I think was just so fascinating about it is that just like any other brain system, you can train it kind of like a muscle.
The more you pay attention to it, the more those brain cells wire to each other and become much more readily available.
Kind of like when you learn a new language, it's really tough and eventually becomes second nature.
So, what's it really like living with mirror-touch synesthesia?
Walking through the halls of a hospital as a doctor, feeling, literally feeling the pain of his patients?
Dr. Salinas describes that next.
As a physician, especially while you were training, and you were doing probably a surgical rotation, you don't want to feel that bandsaw to the chest every time you go in the OR. Can you make it less?
Can you turn it down?
Yeah, I figured out ways to kind of turn down the volume a little bit.
So, an example, I was in the trauma rotation as a medical student, and I remember walking to a room and immediately feeling as though I couldn't feel anything just below my bicep on my left arm.
And then I saw that the patient in front of me actually had an amputee.
His arm was cut off from the bicep down.
Oh my goodness.
You felt it before you saw him.
Yeah, it's just how amazing the brain works.
The information was being processed before I was consciously aware of it.
Got it.
Yeah, it's just very humbling to know that the brain is doing so much processing before you're even aware that it's doing the processing.
Do you not have it if you can't see what's going on?
So if someone's saying, if you're hearing that someone's in pain, do you feel it as well or do you have to see them?
That's a brilliant observation you're making in that it's really about the senses.
If the brain captures this information through any of the senses, it'll begin to recreate it.
I lead in talking about the vision touch aspect of it because we're such vision-oriented animals as humans.
80% of our senses probably are vision-oriented.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But it's everything.
It all kind of comes together.
So just hearing somebody else experience something, I begin to have that recreation.
It's much more vivid when it's visual and much more mirrored.
So seeing you here, I feel as though I have my hair parted along the right side of my head and I feel like my hands are crossed and I feel the sensation of a necklace on my neck.
So it's literally like I'm looking at myself in the mirror.
Yeah.
If I start to stroke Lisa's arm here, which you can see, what do you feel?
I feel as though there's a set of phantom fingers gently stroking my left forearm.
Like a mirror.
Oh my goodness.
Wow.
I think that if you could figure this out, it would be incredible for AI. Video games would be so much more interesting, right?
Well, there's some amazing work being done in this that relates to empathy and compassion.
So...
There's just one experiment where they take people and put them into a virtual reality world.
Before they go into this virtual world, they have them see images of people and relate with how they feel about those people.
And then they put them into a VR shell or skin, literally in the skin of somebody else that doesn't look like them.
So if you're a young white woman who's blonde, in this game you're an older black man.
And you just kind of spend some time looking at yourself in the mirror, kind of moving around as if you're looking in the mirror, and then afterwards they find out that your thoughts are much more positive for that group than beforehand.
So the more you feel that the people that you're looking at are you, the more you can relate with them, the more positive those experiences are.
You even see that in people who are family and spouses.
So if you look at brain activity as it relates to pain, for example, these kind of mirroring systems are much more active when you see an image of yourself being touched or in pain, just a little bit less when you're seeing a loved one or a family member, and very little When you see someone who doesn't look like you or who considers to be a stranger I think that says a lot about how we relate with each other.
We've been doing, Lisa and I both, a fair amount of work on why we are where we are, and our tribal instincts, natural and obviously historical importance of identifying tribes there.
It doesn't mean you can't respect other tribes, but if you discount the biologic underpinnings of the fact that you're going to be close and connected naturally, then you won't appreciate how difficult it is to go beyond that, because you have to.
In the modern world, you've got to get past where your brain is hardwired to go, which is protect yourself first, then your family.
It makes sense, right?
Genetic links.
They'll be loyal to you back, et cetera.
People look like you.
People behave like you.
People have your values.
But the Bula base of society benefits when all those different factions are brought together, which is why the greatest civilizations were able to conquer that.
And when they lost that ability, then they began to fall apart.
That was a quick summary of something I've figured out over the last couple of months just doing homework on this, which is why I'm intrigued by mere touch synesthesia because it seems to be on one end of the spectrum, but again, as you point out, most of us have a part of it.
How old were you when you realized you weren't exactly like everybody else?
Because I bet you there are a lot of people who are thinking, you know, I sort of felt that way, too.
Maybe I actually have just never paid attention to it.
Yeah.
I never nurtured it.
I always had a sense there was something different or odd about me compared to other people, but I always just chalked it up to being just a very weird kid.
I mean, I remember watching cartoons and seeing Bugs Bunny eating a carrot and feeling like I'm eating a carrot, or Roadbunner sticks out his tongue, I feel like my tongue is sticking out, or Wile E. Coyote gets it by a truck, and I feel like I'm hit by a truck.
Or Wile E. Coyote, never catching a break.
Right?
It was only until medical school that I learned what synesthesia was alone that I experienced the world so different compared to other people.
It was actually, I was doing a medical trip out in India with a group of medical students, and one night we were just talking about the health benefits of meditation, and a friend of mine who had a background in neuroscience chimes into the conversation and says, oh, did you all know there's these people who live like they're having an ongoing acid trip?
And they haven't either time getting into these deep meditative states.
And when he said that, I was most struck by why he would bother mentioning something so ordinary.
It was only after, later that night, I said, you mentioned this thing about people kind of seeing colors when they hear sounds and seeing kind of letters and colors and things.
Like, why would you mention that everybody has that?
Oh my goodness.
He just looked at me and said, no, that's definitely not normal.
So did your family, is your whole family like this?
Because you would have mentioned it at one point to your mother or father, right?
Yeah, it definitely came up in interesting ways growing up.
So, for example, the way I related with other people, I initially was very withdrawn and kept myself away from others.
But also, when I would color as a kid, my numbers had to be very specific colors.
My letters had to be very specific colors.
And I would make comments that just didn't make sense to other people, but they just kind of dismissed it.
The observation about family members, so interestingly, there is a genetic basis to it.
So people with synesthesia are genetically different, and their brains look and work differently compared to other people.
And if you have synesthesia, you're much more likely to have a family member or more who has synesthesia.
And if you don't think you have synesthesia, you probably know somebody who does, and you just haven't asked the right question.
Like, that music, what does it look like?
Yeah, it's just, it's fascinating.
So in the book, you do talk about the fact that it wasn't always a positive effect, that you were lonely.
Yeah.
In a way.
And was the isolation something that you imposed on yourself?
As you point out, some people with mere touch anesthesia, you know, you can't stand to see someone eat.
That's a common one, by the way.
Is it?
Yeah.
Watching, some people don't like...
Ah, yeah.
It's probably driving you crazy, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Thank you.
You all just left the room.
We did a segment on this.
I didn't even realize it because it never bothered me to watch people chew.
But people who, I guess with some form of mere touch with anesthesia, they have this aversion to mastication.
Something about that whole process.
It is dirty.
It's ugly.
I mean, think about what's going on inside your mouth when you chew on something, right?
You're taking something beautiful that looked great because that's why you ate it.
A cookie.
You're chomping into something no one else would ever think about putting it in their mouth.
Unless you grew up as a fat kid, in which case you love watching people eat, like myself.
Perhaps.
So what made you lonely?
Was it the fact that your words sort of made you seem like you weren't like everybody else?
Yeah, I feel like feeling very different from other people, feeling so connected while at the same time being pushed away.
Huh.
And I just didn't want to be hurt and I wanted to be able to be as close as I could to people because that made more sense to me.
To hug people with an experience that I loved because that made so much sense.
Because the physical sensations that I'm seeing in them are actually the sensations that I'm feeling on me.
And it took me many years to slowly kind of come out of that shell and begin to make friends, and then eventually it actually went to the opposite extreme when it kind of drove me into medicine, where I was just diving far too extreme in the experiences of my patients, leading to essentially kind of burning out.
Over the last several years, I feel like I've finally gotten to a place where I can navigate those two extremes a little bit better.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
I am curious about how this manifests itself in so many folks.
You say you want to sort of embrace it because it helps you cope with it.
Is that the best way for people to, if there's a negative effect of synesthesia, for them to cope with it?
Or is it better to avert your eyes if you see something you don't want to see?
I think it depends on the situation.
So I can give the example, like if I'm in the middle of a medical emergency and decisions need to be very fast and I need to follow an algorithm, it doesn't help the patient for me to be totally absorbed in their experience.
I feel you dying.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm with you all the way.
Putting this together.
Yeah, exactly.
In those situations, I focus on a couple of things.
So one, I'll focus on my own physical body.
So the sensation of my tongue in my mouth or my toes in my socks.
Or I'll look at something that doesn't look like a person, like a sleeve or a collar.
And that can help to kind of draw some distance.
But if I'm in the clinic where being more empathetic actually is helpful for a person, then I can really dive into that experience.
When people ask me, how do I pull away from the extreme side of the empathy?
The three things that I say have been really helpful for me is boundaries, resilience, and practice.
So when I say boundaries, it's really about creating really firm, yet really thoughtful boundaries.
So those boundaries are really important to be able to create distance when you need the distance from the people around you.
There's been a lot of work done looking at people who are very empathetic, especially like nurses and doctors, that the ones that are less likely to have burnout are the ones that are able to have strong boundaries.
So what's an example of a boundary?
Yeah, so let's say...
Let's say, here's an example.
So when I began my neurology training, I was also seeing patients who had tic and Tourette's.
And I had one patient who, in the setting of a lot of stress, developed self-mutilating tics.
Oh no.
So he takes his right hand and pushes his knuckle up against the side of his mouth so hard that he begins to kind of shred the side of his mouth apart like shredded beef essentially.
And he grinds his teeth at the same time.
So as I'm watching him do this, I feel this painful buzzing sensation shooting into my left cheek and into my teeth like there's a stun gun being triggered up against my face each time he's having one of these tics.
And in those moments, rather than letting myself kind of just be carried away by his experience, I have to create the boundary of looking away, taking a moment, taking a deep breath, and then focusing more on myself and saying it's okay that I'm not 100% as an experience because for me to help him.
I need that distance.
I mean, I think this is kind of at the core of empathy for any of us.
If you're seeing someone who's suffering, you have two major choices.
One is to get really wrapped up in that distress, turn and run away, or take a deep breath and do something about it.
When you are mirroring someone, do you feel just the physical sensations that you're seeing, or do you feel their emotional state as well?
Yeah.
It's both.
And what's really fascinating is, you know, what emotions are in our brain are actually for the most part physical.
It's the combination of the physical sensations, your awareness of your physical sensations, and kind of where you are, your context.
And for me, it's the emotional aspect of it really comes up when I'm seeing patients who are suffering and may not necessarily be wanting to share that.
So I had this one patient who he developed a little bit of double vision at home, came into the hospital, and thank goodness he came into the hospital because he almost had a stroke in this really important part of the brain where if he had had that stroke, he would have developed what's called a locked-in syndrome.
Mm-hmm.
Where he would have only been able to move his eyes up and down, and that's it.
So we were able to give him the treatment that he needed, thank goodness.
And when I saw him a couple weeks later in my clinic, I was talking to him, checking in to see how he was doing, and he was saying that he was dying, he's exercising every day on the computer, all of his labs were perfect, his cholesterol levels were really great, his diabetes levels were perfect, and I was congratulating about this.
He won this gold medal of health.
But the sense of joy he was giving off didn't match the physical sensations of joy that I'm used to experiencing.
And so I made the decision to press him on this a little bit.
And he just broke down crying.
It turned out he'd been depressed, anxious, just terrified about the idea of having another stroke.
And that's something that blood tests can't tell you, an MRI can't tell you, a standard physical exam can't tell you.
I think the mirror touch was helpful and just having that moment to connect let us have a more earnest conversation about what was going on.
We were able to address it and then start treatment for him and after several weeks he was doing so much better.
I'm curious if we can harvest this power that if That we may be on a spectrum we're unaware of and we've purposely sort of hidden it.
And that's why I want to just tease into how your brain works a little bit.
So when you look at colors, you were starting to say this earlier, but I want to finish the thought.
When you see numbers, you actually see colors around them, right?
Musicians will often see colors around a tune.
When you look at Lisa, do you see a color around her?
Yeah.
Yeah, so there's a form of synesthesia that I have.
I'm also kind of a little odd compared to other people who have synesthesia, because it's just hyper synesthesia, and partly it's just like my genetics and biology, but I also had a tumor over this part of my brain where all the senses converge, and so it's possible that that had something to do with why my form is so extreme, but when I see people, I also had the experience of numbers and colors tied to the people too, that tied to kind of The personality traits of my number.
So I'll give you an example.
So the number three for me, just the number three is a purple number.
Also, the number three is a very humble number.
It also doesn't like to let others know kind of the talents that it has.
It is very, very specific personality traits of this number, which is just kind of bizarre, right?
But when I see people, they may also have a Keep going, it's accurate.
I can confirm that what you're all saying is accurate.
Fierce and feminine.
Yeah, and it happens to everyone.
It's very kind of immediate.
It's similar to how we all have what's called implicit bias, where we all make judgments about people as we see them.
It just happens that my implicit bias is coded in numbers and colors.
I bet you a lot of us have that same bias.
We just don't have the transparency into the process you have.
That's right.
Or the way to articulate it.
I think a lot of us have an immediate impression of someone, but we might not put a number to it.
As you all said earlier, we walk into a room, is the energy a good or a bad energy?
Is the room I'm attracted towards or repelled from?
Yeah.
What color am I? Black.
A sucking energy.
What number?
Negative 14?
Nothing left.
A chi-hole.
A chi-hole.
For you, I would say the main number that comes up for me, there's actually three numbers.
So one is a four, another is a little bit of an eight, and then a little bit of zero.
So the four for me is kind of a bluish-grayish color.
Four is actually one of my favorite numbers.
It's a very passive-friendly number.
Yeah.
That didn't look very passionate about that lady.
Yeah, the eight is a yellow number, which is kind of a hardworking kind of a number.
And then the zero, it's kind of a white iridescent number.
There's usually something, when people have zeros, there's something kind of exceptional about the people.
So, let's look at these numbers, because I've always had a lot of interest in numbers.
And when I travel the world, I see how numbers play a major role in different societies.
In India, neurology is gargantuanly important.
It's more important than the horoscope, or it's part of the horoscope, actually.
A good friend of mine was actually a patient I transplanted.
And we've become close friends, is an expert numerologist.
He happens also to be a billionaire.
But it's not because he's good at working numbers.
He might be that too.
But when he was young, that was his first career, was looking at numbers and how they predict where we are.
And some of it might be more linked to how we perceive people using numbers than anything else.
But eight, you mentioned, I might have a little bit of eight.
In China, where we were this year, it's their special number.
How do you connect...
Yeah, this is getting into the remarkable stuff about synesthesia for all people.
So when we're all born, we all have synesthesia.
It typically goes away at around age two as our brain begins to trim excess connections in the brain.
And what scientists have seen is that the connections that people have between sounds and colors and numbers, some of them are kind of odd and eccentric, but some of them are kind of universally shared.
So for example, sharp cheddar.
How is cheddar sharp?
Or a loud tie.
How is a tie loud?
That's a good question.
I've never thought of that, of course.
Yeah.
And part of it may be that culturally we've kept this kind of in the cultural DNA, so to speak.
Sometimes it relates to what we're describing as color.
So things that are hot, for example, or things that kind of warm tend to be like orange or yellow or tend to be kind of fiery.
But there are some of these associations that are across everybody, regardless of culture.
So there may be some genetics that actually are responsible for the weird connections that we have.
We're so much more connected than we think.
I love this.
So if you want to figure out whether you have a type of synesthesia, is there a quick survey, quiz, so we can sit back and say, oh my goodness, I never knew for the last 25 years I've had this issue, now I know why?
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a few questionnaires that just ask you very straightforward questions about whether you relate with having a blending of the senses or when you see somebody else in pain, whether you feel like you're having pain.
And what you see is that out of the group of people who score really high on these tests, When you bring them into a lab, you're much more likely to find people who have this extreme form of mirror touch.
But I think in general, it just goes to show that you're on this higher end of the spectrum.
So if it's okay with everybody, I'm not going to go through the whole questionnaire right now because you won't keep track of it.
As many of you are driving, it could be dangerous.
So we're going to put it on dros.com.
I'll put a quiz.
About 10 questions?
It's just a few questions, yeah.
And then take it.
If you think you've got mirror touch, it might be an interesting change in your life.
I really enjoyed I enjoy speaking with you.
Oh, it's been a pleasure.
You brought to light something that I heard of but had very little deep insight into.
I can see why it would be helpful in medicine, but I want to echo what you were saying earlier, that we all have it.
We probably want to nurture it a little bit if we can.
Sort of fun to do the little experiment.
Maybe everyone listening can try that today.
Just see if there's something that's just catching you A little off guard.
That you're seeing connections between different senses that you normally wouldn't sense.
You mentioned color, by the way, but you can also get a smell, right?
Yeah, exactly.
You can smell something when I see somebody.
Not because they smell bad.
Lots of examples like that.
The book's called Mirror Touch.
Well-reviewed.
And Joe Salinas, if you want to see him, go up to Seeming Clinic in Boston.
Or just watch some of his work, because I'm sure you've got Lashboy Willow Tall folks.
