Annabella Wood's blog

Synesthesia
12/7/2006
Annabella Wood
Bio Paper Three

Do you hear color? Do you see sounds? If so, does a certain sound have a certain color?
Can you taste sounds? Do you hear a sound when you touch a certain texture? If so,
chances are, you are a synesthete.

But take heart, you are not alone. Synesthesia is actually very common by some
standards. Estimates range from 1 in 100,000 (1) to 1 in 100(2) people are synesthetes.
But the fact that this range is so wide tells us that we really don’t know how many
synesthetes there are.

What is a belief, and why bother having any? After all, if nothing can be proven as true, why would we believe in anything anyway? But certainly, we believe things, even against all sensory input.

For instance, if you stand in the middle of train tracks and look at them going off in the distance, your sensory input tells you that they meet up yonder a ways. And yet, you don’t believe that. Why would you go against your perceptory input on this? Probably it is because you have prior experience with tracks, watching them while on a train or walking, and have had the experience of seeing them open up before you as you move. Or do they open up before you? Though your senses tell you they do, you don’t believe that either. You believe they are stationary, not moving. But if that is true, how come they come together at the horizon, but never where you are?

Do you feel sick after ingesting milk products? Do you have to stay away from foods that
contain milk or cheese? If so, you are possibly lactose intolerant. You might also be
allergic to dairy. The two conditions are not the same, though they share one effect on
people’s lives; staying away from dairy foods. We will not explore dairy allergies in this
paper.

Here we are exploring lactose intolerance. What is lactose intolerance? Lactose
intolerance is a condition brought on by a lack of the digestive enzyme lactase, whose job
it is to break up the lactose molecule during digestion. If you don’t have enough lactase
to break up the lactose in your digestion system, lactose will remain inside the intestine.
It can not pass through the intestinal membrane wall to be absorbed into the blood stream.
When the lactose is sitting in your intestine, digestive bacteria will do its best to
metabolize the lactose. In doing so, the bacteria put off large amounts of gas, resulting in
your experience of bloating, flatulence and diarrhea, all of which can be quite painful. (1)