The Giants Shoulder #35 What People Who Taste Triangles Reveal About Consciousness! Dr Anina Rich
Dr. Anina Rich is a cognitive neuroscientist and one of the world’s foremost experts on synesthesia — the rare phenomenon where senses merge, allowing people to see music, taste shapes, or feel touch by sight alone.But synesthesia isn’t a neurological glitch — it’s a window into how all of our brains construct reality.
In this conversation, we explore how synesthesia reveals the brain’s hidden architecture: how we fuse the senses, how attention shapes perception, and why reality itself might just be a controlled hallucination.
Expect to learn what it’s like to taste triangles, why some people feel physical pain when watching someone else get hurt, whether psychedelics can trigger temporary synesthesia, the strange science of sound-color associations, how the brain decides what to notice (and what to ignore), what synesthesia tells us about consciousness, why your brain doesn’t just perceive the world but predicts it, and how understanding this might make us more compassionate, focused, and self-aware.This is one of the most mind-bending explorations of perception and consciousness ever recorded.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:56 Exploring Reality and Perception
03:57 Understanding Synesthesia
12:54 The Subjectivity of Experience
14:44 The Complexity of Conscious Experience
18:00 Developmental Theories of Synesthesia
22:17 Personal Experiences and Synesthetic Associations 30:30 Common Patterns in Synesthetic Experiences
30:36 Exploring Synesthesia and Its Mechanisms
31:56 Brain Connectivity and Synesthetic Experiences
33:44 Innovative Research Methods in Synesthesia
38:58 Understanding Perception Through Synesthesia
42:56 Implications of Synesthesia on Consciousness
47:42 Attention and Its Role in Perception
52:53 Synesthesia and Psychedelics
56:00 Creativity and Synesthesia
57:52 The Subjectivity of Conscious Experience
01:00:05 Future Directions in Synesthesia Research
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