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Would like to see more discussion either here or in class on what Professor Grobstein meant when he introduced the concept of hearing lightening or seeing thunder.

Was he referencing the fact that all our sensory perceptions are translated into the same action potential, which when viewed from "above" would look exactly the same? Is he making a nod towards the brain's central role in the construction of sensation? Why is this different from or how is it related to synesthesia?

As per my post last week, synesthesia may result from higher connectivity between processing centers in the brain (oh diffusion tensor imaging, how cool you are). So in addition to having the pigment in the back of your retina change in the presence of light, which in turn converts to an "eletrical" signal along the soma of the "vision" neuron, which passes along the axon as an action potential through the thalamus to the occipital lobe to be perceived as vision, another errant axon picks up the excitation along the way and in carrying it to the temporal lobe produces the sensation of hearing... I think. Does this view lend credence to the earlier analogy of the production of sensation as a telephone switchboard?