Beyond Selidor

For quite some time I've thought the forms of synaesthesia science has documented and studied may be just scratching at the surface of some really interesting cognitive phenomena.

The simplistic model of five senses which send data to your conscious mind is patently wrong. For a start there are senses other than the traditional five, like balance; but more to the point our brains do a lot of processing on sensory information before the part we call conscious gets a hold of it. So for example we don't "sense" light, in that what we experience doesn't primarily consist of pixels; we sense objects, and motion, and colours, and facial expressions, and other visual activity our brains consider significant.

We're aware of some straight forward cases of blending, where some people have the same experience under the stimuli of a orange shades as they do under low frequency notes, for example - but if you consider we might have a couple of dozen or more "senses", many of which may be more abstract than the traditional ones, it wouldn't be surprising if experiences like yours are quite common.