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The Synaesthesia Thread

Wednesday always feels like a green day to me, starting at a very dark green in the morning, changing to a brighter green after 12pm, then after 5pm a spanking spangley fluorescent green :)
 
i considered the "colour" of each day of the week a long time ago, when i was in school. i decided wednesday was green. then i was rather disappointed when i realised that my day-colours did basically correspond to the radio times (which my parents bought), hahaha.

it would be interesting to do a survey that compared what tv guide people bought and what colours they feel that days have. that's quite interesting in itself, that people might subconsciously associate the colour from the tv guide with the day of the week.
 
Wednesday has always been "green" for me, since I was a small boy. Saturday was Red, Monday blue, Friday yellow... I used to have colours for the whole week, but don't recall them now.
 
colours of words...

.....and what about general words - does anyone else have colours for them too?

What about the names of the colours - it's crazy I know but mine go like this'-

Red - Shiny gold!
Blue - white and silver 'fuzzy' texture
Green - white 'crisp linen' texture
yellow - black and white
Purple - silver gray 'misty'
orange - brown and beige-ish
Pink - er...pink actually!!!
 
lopaka said:
I was wondering if you broke it down geographically, as you mentioned in your initial post. I found the Radio Times thing interesting as I too have no idea what it is and chose orange (USA, duh :) ).
Click to expand...

That's funny, I picked orange too. Seems like for the MB at least, orange is the 2nd favorite.
 
I have always visualised words and numbers as being *coloured* as far as I can remember back to Nursery School.

Like the number 4 is definitely red whereas 6 is brown, 7 is purple. 1 to 10 all have different colours associated to them yet when I get to double figures they then are all the same tone. 20-29 are orange, 30-39 are green etc..

eg. *Because* is also orange to me. *Mirror* is grey and *Nice* is purple.

I just presumed everybody thought like this although I tend to think that I may have got this colour association from watching too much Sesame Street as a kid.

Where each number and letter of the day would be flashed on the screen throughout the programme in primary colours.


Oh I also visualise Wednesday as green too.
 
what colour is wednesday...

How's this for an amazing coincidence???!

I had never, until reading this thread, realised that synaesthesia was an actual documented fact, and I had been utterly fascinated to read all the other poster's opinions and experiences on the subject. This in itself was amazing enough, (and worth the price of my computer!!)

I bought the Radio Times today (which seems to have figured large in this discussion - and - no - I never read it as a child - we didn't have a tv until I had grown up and left home anyway, and even had my parents read it, at the time it would have been printed in black and white...but I digress..) What do I see on Thursday 30th September at 9pm but an 'Horizon' documentary about....Synaesthesia!!!

Spooky or what!!!
 
MY sister and I always think in color

I am so excited to see this thread- my sister and I always think in color and if we are trying to describe something or we forget a word for something we say it "reminds me of dark green" and can usually guess what the other is talking about. We have color for all of the numbers (although hers are different from mine, I see 1 as yellow, 2 as green, 3 as brown, 4 as green, 5 as brown, six as orange, 8 as purple, 9 as brown-orange and ten as navy blue, etc.) I think of the months of the year as colors and days as well. Wednesday DEFINITELY makes me think of BROWN.
 
Now this is odd.

I'm synaesthetic. KNown that for ages. But I'm not a word/colour or sound/colour synaesthetic.

I'm a colour/taste & texture sound/taste & texture synaesthetic. I can't have bright yellow in the house because it tastes really nasty.

But I immediately thought that Wednesday was green as well.

So what's the trick?

Sam
 
Wednesday is YELLOW for me. And is my favourite day.

Have never seen a Radio Times.
 
This is probably not quite synaesthesia, more like sensory memory, but for me, flavors have times and seasons. For instance, green tea is a winter afternoon. Watermelon, is obviously summertime. But chocolate is late late at night. And red wine is too. Plain fresh water is a fall flavor, and dried apricots are cloudy fall afternoons.... Some things are obvious associations that are memory driven, but some are not so obvious. For instance, I am NOT a night person, so I never ever eat anything caffinated late, so why is chocolate a late night taste? And I would have said "spring" for fresh water, but it evokes fall, every time.
 
I'm watching the BBC2 Horizon programme about synaesthesia and I've just took part in an online test here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/index_surveys.shtml

Click on "Do you see what I see?" for a quick test.

I apparently scored quite highly 18 out of I think 23 or 24* for the associating colours with words, numbers and weekdays and on the number spatial test. At the end of the test is a number of useful links such as this:

Synaesthesia Research Group
http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/jamie.ward/synaesthesia.htm


*luckily it wasn't a memory test else I would have failed miserably :D
 
My husband's boss was watching Horizon last night. Turns out he has syneasthesia, and a "number line" and had spent the last 35 years thinking everyone had this.
 
white, i thought white somehow. like a cloudy white. bear in min i've just taken a klonopin so i may be seeing colours of my own in my mind. whooo look at all the psychedelic swirls.
 
Mon 17 Jan 2005

The colour of music

MARGARET COOK

I’VE JUST discovered I have a mild form of synaesthesia. Is it romantic or fatal? More the former, I would say. It is where the brain does not have a clear division between the reception of different sensations. For instance, the Finnish composer Sibelius saw notes as colours and smelled them too. Most commonly linked sensations are visual and auditory, taste and touch, olfactory and auditory. Most synaesthetes are women; assessments vary, but it may be eight times more common in females.

Even more oddly, there is a link with people who have odd experiences such as déjà vu, premonitions or clairvoyance. In musical synaesthetes, it is not uncommon to find the wonderful gift of perfect pitch.

I’ve always been aware that the days of the week have distinct colours, as do the names of months, numbers and letters of the alphabet, though they’ve faded with the years. As a child I discovered my sister had the same peculiarity, though her colour system was different. Since then I had assumed it was normal. My type seems to be the commonest, but mingled experiences of smell, taste and touch are much rarer.

Some descriptions are quite exotic, for instance piano tones seen as blue fog, guitar notes perceived as floating orange stripes in front of the body; phone numbers remembered as a multi-coloured string of pearls, sensing music as the aroma of hay, smelling a rose as a touch upon the skin, relishing the taste of pepper sauce as sharp, pointy triangles. The number five might be middle-aged, female, gentle and the colour of honey.

Some people even see the world in different colours according to mood.

Naturally, the psychologists have tried to claim the phenomenon for their own, but affected people have proved stubbornly mentally normal, apart from, in general, having rather good memories and unusual artistic talent.

Children who try to explain their tangled sensations are usually faced with blank incomprehension, like one little girl who announced to her teacher, "four plus four is red," to the mocking hilarity of her peers.

Synaesthesia has been recognised for about 300 years, and until recently was thought to be very rare; estimates of 1 in 2,000 at the most. But research in the last decade puts it as high as 1 in 100, including the mildest examples of mixed messages. Within an individual, the links are very consistent, so it is different from association-testing and having hallucinations. However, related phenomena are seen in LSD takers and schizophrenics. I recall one schizophrenic reporting severe pain which she felt in the curtains around the bed.

Besides Sibelius, the composers Skrjabin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Messiaen had the trait, also artists Hockney and Kandinsky and the author Nabokov.

Synaesthesia holds a particular fascination for the artistic world. It is a desirable gift, an enhancement of sensuality, a manifestation of creativity, and has inspired volumes of poetry, music, literature, folklore and analysis. Periodically it has stimulated multi-modal concerts of music and light and sometimes perfume. Meanwhile the science world has been ambivalent about researching something so wholly subjective.

Current science accepts that synaesthesia is inherited, as an X-linked trait in many cases, which explains the female predominance. It is possible that all infants are born with muddled sensory experiences, for instance, in them a sound triggers auditory, visual and tactile vibes. This state of psychedelia is due to hyper-connectivity between sensory parts of the brain, and normally about the age of four months these connections are automatically pruned to leave more specific responses. Synaesthetes have a genetic mutation that interferes with this pruning. There are probably genetic variants to explain the different sensory melanges, and extensive connections left between brain areas that deal with abstract concepts seem likely to convey a marked degree of artistic creativity as well as disabling distraction in ordinary, everyday matters.

Magnetic resonance imaging has clarified with some precision the colour vision areas involved in the visual cortex of the brain. The limbic system which controls consciousness is connected, as well as other sensory centres. Some synaesthetic experiences occur outwith the body, which implicates the angular gyrus, thought to be the seat of "out of body" experiences. Synaesthesia research may cast new light on perception, thought, consciousness and language.

--------------------
• If you think you may be a covert synaesthete and would like to contribute to pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge, there is a website where you can take a test:
www.bbc.co.uk/ science/humanbody/mind/index_surveys.shtml
Click to expand...

Source
 
Musician can 'taste music'

From correspondents in Paris
March 03, 2005
From: Agence France-Presse


A SWISS musician sees colours when she hears music, and experiences tastes ranging from sour and bitter to low-fat cream and mown grass, astounded scientists say.

Zurich University neuropsychologists were so intrigued by the case of E.S. - a 27-year-old professional musician whose full name has been withheld - that they recruited her for a year-long inquiry.

They say she is the world's most extreme known case of synaesthesia, the phenomenon whereby hearing music triggers a response in other sensory organs.

E.S. sees colours when she hears a tone, with for instance an F sharp causing her to see violet while a C makes her see red, quite literally.
Advertisement:

Even more remarkable is that she also gets a taste on her tongue according to the note she hears.

A tone interval of a minor second induces sourness, while a major second leaves a bitter taste.

A minor third is salty, while a major third is sweet.

Other tastes, according to the tone, are of "pure water," cream (either full or low-fat, depending on the note), "disgust" and also of mown grass.

To provide an objective test, the scientists applied one of four different-tasting solutions (sour, bitter, salty and sweet) to her tongue and then asked her to press a button on a computer keyboard corresponding to four relevant tones.

She responded with perfect accuracy and much faster than five musicians, recruited for the same test, who do not have her synaesthesic gifts.

E.S.' "extraordinary" synaesthesia has probably been a boon in her career by attuning her to the right pitch, the researchers say.

-----------------------
The study, led by Lutz Jaencke, appears in the British weekly science journal Nature.
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Source

Paper:

Beeli, G., Esslen, M. & Jäncke, L. (2005) Synaesthesia: When coloured sounds taste sweet. Nature. 434 (7029). 38.

Synaesthesia is the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal linkage — for example, hearing a tone (the inducing stimulus) evokes an additional sensation of seeing a colour (concurrent perception). Of the different types of synaesthesia, most have colour as the concurrent perception, with concurrent perceptions of smell or taste being rare. Here we describe the case of a musician who experiences different tastes in response to hearing different musical tone intervals, and who makes use of her synaesthetic sensations in the complex task of tone-interval identification. To our knowledge, this combination of inducing stimulus and concurrent perception has not been described before.
Click to expand...

and a report @ Nature:
www.nature.com/news/2005/050228/full/050228-9.html
 
I scored a 16 out of 24 or whatever on the first section of that, but I think it's more to do with having a good memory than anything else... I chose the color initially on a feeling, but then the second go-round just remembered what my first response was.

Wednesday for me is a bright, hopeful sort of purple.
I'd be interested in knowing whether the Wednesday = green thing is uniform amongst people for whom Wednesday is the mid of their workweek; mine starts on a Wednesday, so I would assume I view it a bit differently than most -- though my answer is a bit telling about my personality.
 
Oh I love this thread. First of all I think Wednesday is red.
Here are my colours for the days:

Monday: White
Tuesday: Yellow
Wednesday: Red
Thursday: Browny/Green
Friday: Black
Saturday: See through
Sunday: See through with dark bits in it

My husband and I also often discuss tastes in shapes. For example I cook and feel that there is a "pointy" taste missing and then my husband tries and says: "Could do with a bit more "round" and I know exactly what he means.
I can discribe all tastes in shapes. Chicken for example is like a greek square spiral and pasta (my favourite) is chunky squares. Tomato sauce (if pointy enough) should be wavy if cooked correctly.
Burgers are soooo round tasting, with a few of edgy rectangles...
Chocolate is flat small disks and milk is parallel lines. Maybe I should stop here, getting hungry.
 
Until a few weeks ago I thought everyone had this kind of thing, for me it's mostly music and some voices- Elvis type music is particularly Slidgy green and Brown, Trumpets are scarlet & stripey, Rock music tends to be Purple. It has faded over the years and too be honest I've not given it much thought before.

Wednesday is definitley green, Forest green.
Monday is deep purple,
Tuesday-Blue ish
Wedneaday- Green
Thursday Yellow
Friday Golden yellow
Saturady-Blue
Sunday- No colour

refernce the earlier article
Perhaps it's not that either have this or not from birth, rather that we learn as children that comments like "4 + 4 is RED" invokes ridicule from our peers. We self prune in effect

annic
 
Rainbow Coalition of the Brain

By Rowan Hooper

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,66770,00.html

02:00 AM Mar. 04, 2005 PT

Imagine every time you hear the telephone ring, you taste a burrito with jalapeño and guacamole. Believe it or not, some people -- synesthetes -- experience things just like that.

For them it's like being hooked up to a weird virtual-reality machine. The number 7 may look green, or the color red might smell of soap. G-flat on the piano might look like broken glass.

Could you even hear yourself think, with all that going on? Far from being limiting, new research suggests that synesthesia, from the Greek words for "together" and "perception," actually helps with cognitive processes.

Neuroscientists think the condition occurs because certain regions of the brain "cross-activate" at the same time. So the tone perception center, for example, may be linked with the taste perception center. And studying synesthetes is giving clues to the working of the brain, one of the most complex structures in the universe.

"Synesthesia shows how many variations in normal brain function are possible," said Michaela Esslen, of the department of neuropsychology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Synesthetes have normal IQs and may number up to one in 2,000 people. Esslen said the connections between synesthetes' brain regions may have been disconnected in other people.

"One theory as to how synesthesia originates is that neuronal connections in the brain that might exist in the newborn brain do not degrade as in normal brains, but remain in synesthetes," she said.

Peter Brugger, a professor at the Neuropsychology Unit of Zurich University Hospital, said: "In a way, the really burning question is how the normal brain succeeds so well in keeping all this information separate."

That question is yet to be answered, but this week Esslen, with colleagues Gian Beeli and Lutz Jancke, published a paper in Nature supporting the idea that synesthesia can help cognitive processes. They describe a female professional musician who "tastes" sounds.

The woman, referred to as E.S., experiences a scale of tastes depending on the tone interval of the music being played. The minor sixth tone interval, for example, produces the taste of cream in her mouth. Amazingly, the major sixth produces the taste of low-fat cream.

E.S. reports that she benefits from her synesthetic perceptions while she performs music or solves music-related tasks -- and the Zurich researchers confirmed this in tests.

Previous work, at Waterloo University in Ontario, Canada, has also shown that synesthesia can help with cognition. Subjects said linking numbers with colors helped them perform mathematical calculations.

The extraordinary potential of synesthesia to boost the memory was documented in the classic The Mind of a Mnemonist by Russian psychologist A.S. Luria.

The latest Swiss work adds to the growing evidence that synesthesia can aid cognition.

"It is now widely agreed that synesthesia involves indirect activation of regions of the brain involved in perceptual processing," said Lawrence Marks, director of the John B. Pierce Laboratory at Yale.

Marks was resident neuroscientist and discussant at last month's Synesthesia and Perception meeting held by the College Art Association in Atlanta.

"Research on the brain mechanisms of synesthesia will be terribly important to understanding brain processes and mind-brain relations more generally," he said.

In Zurich, professor Brugger is doing just that, and in the process has created a kind of synesthetic out-of-body experience. "Virtual reality is a kind of synesthesia," he said, "because you feel yourself to be at the place your vision suggests you to be."

Brugger hooks up volunteers to a VR headset so they can view themselves from behind.

"By seeing yourself walking in front of yourself for prolonged periods, you will eventually feel at a distance of some meters in front of yourself -- a simulated doppelganger, if you want," Brugger said.

Synesthesia research offers an explanation for a phenomenon that has been described by psychics.

Many self-proclaimed psychics say they can detect a person's aura, often described as a colorful energy field given off by certain people. But Jamie Ward, head of the Synesthesia Research Group at University College London, said some people can experience colors in response to people they know -- a condition called emotion-color synesthesia.

"The ability of some people to see the colored auras of others has held an important place in folklore and mysticism throughout the ages," said Ward. "Rather than assuming that people give off auras or energy fields that can only be detected by rigged cameras or trained seers, we need only assume that the phenomenon of synesthesia is taking place."
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Source
 
This reminds me of the savant Daniel Tammet.

. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think."
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I wonder if synesthesia is a mild form of autism? or perhaps there is no connection at all- perhaps it's just the imagery that Daniel uses to explain what goes on in his mind.
 
No synasthesia has nothing to do with autism IMO. It comes about when our neural netwaork is developing. Basically all imput from the outside world is coded in the same way, it is just "interpreted" or read differently by each sensory organ but after that it converts back to the same old pattern. So for the brain it doesn't make any difference if a noise for example would be sent to the visual cortex, as it could still make something out of the pattern, so some people "see music" which is due to some extra wiring during development to both the visual and the temporal cortex.
Autism however is very probably due to some connections being amiss from the sensory organs to certain parts of the brain, which results in autistic people needing more and stronger stimulus to make sense of their world than other people.
 
I'm actually quite interested in Synaesthesia, as last yr I studied the works of French Composer, Messiaen who 'suffered' from this condition and it affected the way he composed and stuff. I think it's just the whole mix up of the senses that fascinates me, but it was very interesting to see what colour he related to each note he used.
 
Seeing numbers as colours!

I "experience" this... though in my case it's days of the week, not numbers!


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4375977.stm


US scientists say they can explain why some people 'see' colours when they look at numbers and letters.

As many as one in 2,000 people has an extraordinary condition in which the five senses intermingle, called synaesthesia.

Some see colours when they hear music or words. Others 'taste' words.

The study in Neuron tracked the brain activity of people with the most common form and found peaks in areas involved with perceiving shapes and colours.

Cross-wiring

The University of California San Diego team said their findings lend support to the idea that the condition is due to cross-activation between adjacent areas of the brain involved with processing different sensory information.

This cross-wiring might develop, they believe, by a failure of the "pruning" of nerve connections between the areas as the brain develops while still in the womb.


People with synaesthesia tend to want A to be red, S to be yellow and Z to be black



Synaesthesia researcher Dr Julia Simner, of the University of Edinburgh


For example, a person with synaesthesia might see red when they look at an ordinary figure '5' drawn in black ink on a white background because the red colour perception area of their brain is stimulated at the same time as the number recognition area.

The researchers conducted a series of experiments on volunteers with and without synaesthesia.

When the people without synaesthesia looked at letters and numbers only the brain areas involved with processing this information light up on brain activity scans.

In comparison, the people with synaesthesia had activity in colour perception regions as well.

Colour by numbers

Furthermore, some of the people with synaesthesia appeared to be better at 'seeing' colours than the others.

Those who had stronger colour perception had more activity in their colour perception brain areas.

Researcher Vilayanur Ramachandran said processes similar to synaesthesia might also underlie our general capacity for metaphor and be critical to creativity.

"It is not an accident that the condition is eight times more common among artists than the general population."

Dr Julia Simner, who has been studying synaesthesia at the University of Edinburgh along with colleagues at University College London, said the findings were supported by similar work looking at people who see colours when they hear sounds.

"Interestingly, we've recently analysed the letter-colour combinations of a very large number of people with synaesthesia and found that there are significant trends in their preferences.

"For example, people with synaesthesia tend to want A to be red, S to be yellow and Z to be black."

She said her research also revealed that people without synaesthesia have significant preferences for the colours of letters.

"Some of these choices were fairly obvious, such as 'O' being orange, but some were quite intriguing, and showed a similarity to those of people with synaesthesia."

Her findings are currently in press to appear in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology.

Jennifer Green from the University of Cambridge, who has also been carrying out research in this area, said: "Some describe seeing the colours induced by letters and numbers as projected externally into space, while others report experiencing them internally, or in their 'mind's eye'.

"This research lends further support to empirical evidence suggesting that these varying descriptions represent actual differences in the way synaesthesia occurs in individuals."
Click to expand...
 
Why some see colours in numbers

US scientists say they can explain why some people 'see' colours when they look at numbers and letters.

As many as one in 2,000 people has an extraordinary condition in which the five senses intermingle, called synaesthesia.

Some see colours when they hear music or words. Others 'taste' words.

The study in Neuron tracked the brain activity of people with the most common form and found peaks in areas involved with perceiving shapes and colours.

Cross-wiring

The University of California San Diego team said their findings lend support to the idea that the condition is due to cross-activation between adjacent areas of the brain involved with processing different sensory information.

This cross-wiring might develop, they believe, by a failure of the "pruning" of nerve connections between the areas as the brain develops while still in the womb.

People with synaesthesia tend to want A to be red, S to be yellow and Z to be black
Synaesthesia researcher Dr Julia Simner, of the University of Edinburgh

For example, a person with synaesthesia might see red when they look at an ordinary figure '5' drawn in black ink on a white background because the red colour perception area of their brain is stimulated at the same time as the number recognition area.

The researchers conducted a series of experiments on volunteers with and without synaesthesia.

When the people without synaesthesia looked at letters and numbers only the brain areas involved with processing this information light up on brain activity scans.

In comparison, the people with synaesthesia had activity in colour perception regions as well.

Colour by numbers

Furthermore, some of the people with synaesthesia appeared to be better at 'seeing' colours than the others.

Those who had stronger colour perception had more activity in their colour perception brain areas.

Researcher Vilayanur Ramachandran said processes similar to synaesthesia might also underlie our general capacity for metaphor and be critical to creativity.

"It is not an accident that the condition is eight times more common among artists than the general population."

Dr Julia Simner, who has been studying synaesthesia at the University of Edinburgh along with colleagues at University College London, said the findings were supported by similar work looking at people who see colours when they hear sounds.

"Interestingly, we've recently analysed the letter-colour combinations of a very large number of people with synaesthesia and found that there are significant trends in their preferences.

"For example, people with synaesthesia tend to want A to be red, S to be yellow and Z to be black."

She said her research also revealed that people without synaesthesia have significant preferences for the colours of letters.

"Some of these choices were fairly obvious, such as 'O' being orange, but some were quite intriguing, and showed a similarity to those of people with synaesthesia."

Her findings are currently in press to appear in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology.

Jennifer Green from the University of Cambridge, who has also been carrying out research in this area, said: "Some describe seeing the colours induced by letters and numbers as projected externally into space, while others report experiencing them internally, or in their 'mind's eye'.

"This research lends further support to empirical evidence suggesting that these varying descriptions represent actual differences in the way synaesthesia occurs in individuals."

---------------------
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/h ... 375977.stm

Published: 2005/03/24 01:14:27 GMT

© BBC MMV
Click to expand...
 
Synaesthesia on my face?!

I am synaesthetic (didn't realise until I saw a programme on telly a few years ago. It's mainly coloured letters and numbers - colours in particular fascinate me and I can spend ages looking at colour charts for paint etc. What an exciting life I lead, eh? The weirdest thing is - not sure it's anything to do with synaesthesia - that parts of my face correspond with certain memories and passages in books that I've read. I can't explain it better than that. Like when I'm putting on make up or plucking my eyebrows, I get these images in my mind about the different parts of my face - always the same ones for the same places.
Ok, maybe I'm a loony or something, but just wondered if anyone else could explain this, or has experienced something similar. I haven't mentioned it to anyone else in case they think I'm due for a trip to the funny farm. BTW I've never taken drugs and very rarely drink to excess - maybe I should......
 
Derek tastes of ear wax, right?

I saw that Horizon programme too and was entranced.

I see this type of abstract ability as a natural part of being human - ASAIK we are the only animal to think in abstract ways, some say that's what set us apart from the other apes and allowed us to become so successful.

I heard that schizophrenia is also supposed to be a common human trait - maybe someone can enlighten me?
 
I honestly recon it will be exactly the same with animals. Brains are all the same, the higher up the ladder we go, the larger the grey mass but everything else is exactly the same.
Dogs and cats have been known to be suffer from depression. I have seen "mad" animals [especially dogs and cats] where the only explanation I could come up with was schitzophrenia [irrational behaviour, agression, change of character etc.]

They don't speak our language so we have to go by behaviour. I am very opposed to the notion that humans are somewhat "higher" than other animals and therefore the only ones that could suffer from mental illness. All that is different in our brains is the mass of grey matter and even though it gives us some advantages [ within the motor neurons for our hands for example], the fact that other animals still have large amounts should be suffice to guess that whatever can go wrong with us, can go wrong with them.
All brains work to the same principles, ions, neurotransmitters and action potentials. It doesn't matter if you are a frog or a giraffe.
 
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