Will Byrnes's Reviews > Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: The Astonishing New Science of the Senses

I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of the sensory world.”

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Synesthesia has been incorrectly defined, in my humble opinion, as “crossed wires in the brain” or “mixed-up senses.” In fact, synesthetes have the same primary response to a stimulus as neurotypical people do. If the numeral 5 appears in newsprint, I know that it is black on a white (well, somewhat beige) background. However, simultaneously, I see navy blue around that number and above that number it, like an aura. Therefore, I’ve created what I believe is a much better definition: Synesthesias are traits in which a sensory stimulus yields the expected sensory response plus one or more additional sensory responses.

For myself, I have always been on the lower end of the taste/smell sensitivity bell curve, presuming there to be such a thing. I have always attributed this to the DNA luck of the draw. Some of it, though, might be a product of my homemaker mother’s abilities as a cook. There were a few things she made that were mouth-watering, but for the most part, it was said of Mom that she had a close relationship with Chef-Boyardee. Thus, it is no shock that my appreciation for cuisine exists in a narrow range. As smell is closely associated with taste, the two have traveled this low experiential road together. But maybe there is some hope for me and for folks with limitations like mine Maybe there are ways to expand the range of flavors and aromas we can detect and enjoy. (Make real friends with our taste buds?) That possibility is one of the points that Maureen Seaberg makes in her new book, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. There are several others.


Maureen Seaberg - image from Amazon

Seaberg is a synesthete, gifted with abilities beyond the average. Even within that, she is a tetrachromat, proud possessor of four sets of visual cones to our usual kit of three. She has used this extra-sightedness to help a cosmetics firm produce more pleasing hues. She is also a mirror-touch synesthete, which means that she can feel your pain, really.

Patricia Lynne Duffy, a member of the United Nations Staff 1 Percent for Development Fund committee, was safely ensconced in her Manhattan office, but when she read the proposals before her, she felt the pain of the world’s most fragile people.

She is the author of multiple books on her personal experience as a sensory anomaly, and others looking into the science of what makes us different. Among these are Tasting the Universe, Struck by Genius, and The Synesthesia Experience.

While highlighting the differences in human capacity, Seaberg argues that we are all potentially synesthetes, but that our acculturation has defined limits to what our senses regard as the human range. She says we are capable of much more, and cites sundry studies to show our surprising range. One shows that we can detect light down to a single photon.

Is it that we are all, or most of us, or many of us, capable of experiencing, sensing much more of our world that we have to date? Are these tools in our toolbox that we have merely never been trained to use? Seaberg uses the examples of many people who are either synesthetes, or who have naturally enhanced capabilities to argue that we could be experiencing much, much more than we do. She also notes people who, through traumatic events, (a mugging in one case) have subsequently displayed enhanced capacities, supporting the notion that we all may have considerable untapped potential. One surprising element here is her reporting on the benefits of the Montessori teaching method, which encourages multi-sensate learning.

She suggests we incorporate into our psychological and medical frameworks the notion of a Perception Quotient, or PQ. Just as we have for our rational processing with the intelligence Quotient, or IQ, and EQ for Emotional abilities.

Seaberg spends some time with the question of transhumanism, the notion that people can evolve beyond our current biological constraints by incorporating connections (merging?) with technology. She argues against such, contending that our realized and latent capacities can take us a lot further than we have gone, without the need for electronic enhancement.

There’s plenty of evidence that humans are adapting to, even passing, machines by using their senses. Just look at the mind-meld young people have with their personal devices and the manual deftness with which they use them compared to older generations. Maybe the singularity moves in two directions, and we meet somewhere along the way. There’s a human-based component not yet considered. And since we’ve recently learned that human sensory potentials are far greater than we knew, perhaps we have a little more time to think about the value of being Homo sapiens.

In a related vein, she notes that there are mirror-touch synesthetes who blur those lines.

A very small subset of the neurological outliers known as mirror-touch synesthetes have extreme empathy for machines. They are sometimes able to feel the mechanisms in their own sensitive bodies. I call them machine synesthetes or machine empaths.

She touches on some even more esoteric subjects, like the remote viewing program sponsored by the USA military from the 1970s into the 1990s, and the possibility of consciousness permeating more of our biosphere than we may have realized.

If you are looking for a how-to re expanding your sensate horizons I would look elsewhere. The prompts offered for that here are introductory at best. Seaberg does offer some other places to go for that. This is more a treatise on the possibility of capacity expansion, not a manual for expanding ourselves.

If we are indeed the architects of our own reality, it is clear that some of us have been gifted with a superior toolkit for interpreting what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, in that construction process. Maybe for the rest of us there are some tools in the basement or shed that have been gathering dust all our lives, tools that can be cleaned off, greased up, and maybe even powered up. It may or may not be a widespread opportunity, but it is certainly a hopeful and very interesting one. In trying to make sense of senses, Maureen Seaberg has written a fascinating, accessible work on human possibility that should stimulate your curiosity, whether or not you experience collateral sounds, colors, scents or other incomings. Checking this book out would definitely be sensible.

“We genuinely experience scent as the emotion we have attached to it,” one sensory educator said. “Our hearts lift at the aroma that reminds us of a happy day at the beach, or our hearts break a little when we smell the aroma of a long-dead relative’s soap.”

Review posted - 10/20/23

Publication date – 8/8/23

I received an ARE of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.



This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages

Interviews
-----Audacy - The Science of Synesthesia and Super Sensors - audio - 30 min
-----PSIfest 2023 – Curious Realm - Maureen Seaberg @PSIFest 2023 - Video – 27:01

Songs/Music
-----Rollingstones - She’s a Rainbow - maybe another form of synesthesia

Items of Interest
-----Untapped Cities - THE SECRET COLORS OF NYC: HOW MAC’S NEW COLOR TALENT SEES THE CITY DIFFERENTLY THAN YOU by Owen Shapiro
-----Charlotte McConaghy’s wonderful novel, Once There Were Wolves, offers a fictional look at someone with mirror-touch synesthesia
-----Wiki - Montessori Method
-----Wiki - The Stargate Project - remote viewing by the military
-----Wiki - Transhumanism
-----Optimax - Tetrachromacy: Do you have superhuman vision?