It’s Saturday and it’s been a long week.

My father is ill and I’ve spent a lot of time this week at the hospital. Apparently stress to a body system can cause delirium in an older person; acute delirium. The show that’s going on in my father’s head must be shockingly vivid considering the hand motions he displays. I’m told recovery is likely once the stress is relieved, but it got me to thinking about the senses.

We tend to think of our senses in terms of the five we all learned in school; touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. We probably rely most upon sight to get around in life, but hearing comes a close second. These two allow us to communicate with each other while touch, taste, and smell allow us to interact with our environment.

But some of these senses are actually combinations of each other.

Take for example hearing. It really involves touch. The bones in our ear vibrate from sound waves, which are nothing more than pressure waves. Our brains turn it into what we think of as sound. With sight we have two different sensors in one. One senses color and the other depth. Smell is really close to taste. Smelling involves bringing in chemicals from the air for analysis. Taste involves testing the chemical makeup of food passing by. They’re so close to each other they often interfere.

Now what happens when the brain, the device that processes all this input, goes on vacay without leaving a note. Input comes in but isn’t always processed properly.

Which got me to thinking about synesthesiacs. These people have a condition where sensory input typically gets processed by more than one system. The results can be as mild as seeing musical notes as colors to hearing tones for numbers. These people have learned to deal with and even appreciate their unique way to view the world.

I wonder if it’s possible to use software to induce a form of synesthesia in a person. Could you wear a helmet that flashed colors when you heard notes and after six weeks you did it on your own? Or teach ourselves to smell certain colors? Would it interfere with life? Could we even learn to experience a new sensory experience if we weren’t born with it? What if it were something new, like an infrared sensor?We wear glasses that allow us to see the infrared over the normal signal hitting our eyes. That doesn’t seem so bad.

But as someone who dabbles in music I’m curious. What if I wrote a program that flashed bars of color for each note, patterns for chords. Would I see those colors without the gear and if so, would they interfere with my ability to write or play music? Would I see colors when I close my eyes and listen to music?

I don’t mean to offend any genuine synesthesiacs out there. I’m just curious. To truly evolve perhaps we need more sensory input, but maybe that’s not a good idea for this hyped up world. Too much input makes us all nervous monkeys.