A rare condition causes a doctor to experience other people's sensations

[..] But to be clear, Salinas cannot read minds. He doesn’t know whether Josh felt the impact of the reflex hammer, and the tingling in his kneecap says more about his own extraordinary nervous system than it does about that of his patient.

The woman in the podcast is debilitated by it. It also includes her family, specifically her daughters, views on it (she doesn't believe it is real) but also hints she might be developing it as well.

Mirror-touch synesthetes struggle with the constant intrusion of others’ feelings. At a symposium on mirror-touch synesthesia last year in London, a woman named Fiona Torrance of Liverpool described how she had once seen one man punch another. She promptly passed out in a car. Her boyfriend at the time found her unconscious and took her to the hospital. “I felt the punch,” she explained. As a child, she once saw a man kill an otter with a spade on television. She was inconsolable for a month, feeling as if she’d killed the otter herself. To this day, she takes medication to control the sensory onslaught, and she does not own a television. A recent episode of the NPR program Invisibilia profiled another woman with the condition who has essentially become a shut-in.

I m extremely accurate in detecting smells , while certain smells will causes extreme pain . It was only in adulthood that I was confronted to explaining why smelling cooked onions cause so much pain in me.

as a result I realized that I actually smell geographically within a about 1 meter cylindrical field around my head . where as onions are in an area inside my head that hurts though it is the same for, calendrical time and numbers.

We often just question our perception of the world when it is immediately compared to other perceptions, or results in discomfort.

I wonder how diverse human perception of the world can actually be without us knowing. If humanity was blind but one person perceived Eyesight but had never learned to communicate his ability to "foresee things", run without hitting objects , this human wouldn't be able to reflect about it because it wasn't integrated in his way of communication.

Maybe for this human seeing a beautiful sunset would remain a dumb feeling, rather than a realization of what it actually is that made them feel that way, since his communication and reflection of the world was not focused on this sense.

I experience this in terms of what other people are feeling emotionally. Its awful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9195553

"Highly Sensitive Persons" and "Empaths".