One night while working the night shift, Megan Pohlmann, 30, scrubbed her hands vigorously, snapped on a pair of blue gloves, and walked into the intensive care unit at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in Missouri, a facility so respected that patients are transported here from around the globe. One baby was very sick and unable to sleep. As Pohlmann stood by his crib, trying to calm him down, her head started throbbing—so hard she found herself wanting to bang it against the wall to stop the pressure. Wow, she recalls saying to herself, I wonder if this baby’s head hurts. And if so, why, because his diagnosis has nothing to do with headaches.

In the morning Pohlmann told the doctors she thought the baby had a severe headache—upon investigation, they found he was experiencing a little-known side effect of the medication he was on. They took him off the drug, and when she saw the child again the following night, he was calm and cooing. He was, she recalls, “a different baby.”

Pohlmann is a skilled pediatric nurse. But there’s another reason she can suss out her patient’s pain: She feels it too. Pohlmann has a rare neurological condition called mirror-touch synesthesia, or MTS, which enables her to have a virtual mind meld with those around her. It’s an empathy so profound she can read room when she walks into it, feel the emotions of strangers before they speak, and even suffer the physical pain of another person’s injury.

“For me, if I see you, I know you,” Pohlmann says. And although that connection is most intense with those she has a close relationship with, it’s always there, whether she’s passing worried shoppers in a mall or standing in line with stressed-out travelers at an airport. “Just walking around every day I feel strangers hurting, and I feel it so thoroughly and completely,” Pohlmann explains. “Crowds are overwhelming sometimes. If I’m at a funeral where some people are devastated, others are relieved, still others are awkward, and kids don’t understand, it’s exhausting—I find it hard to manage everything at once. Mainly, I just want to reach out and help people.”

There are some 80 subtypes of synesthesia and Pohlmann has several, including the ability to see letters as colors and numbers as personae.

Synesthesia is the umbrella term for a range of conditions in which the senses intertwine. Some 4 percent of people report having it, and studies suggest the phenomenon has to do with slight differences in their brains, compared to normal ones, that allow for more cross talk between the wiring for sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. (According to one theory, all babies are born with synesthesia, but most outgrow it as the circuits separate.) Many “synnies,” as they call themselves, perceive letters or days of the week in color (Monday is automatically red, for example; Tuesday, always blue). Some “taste” shapes; others read numbers as personalities (9 is an angry man, 7 a fashionable woman). The conjoined senses often result in amazing memory recall. There are some 80 subtypes of synesthesia—and Pohlmann has several, including the ability to see letters as colors and numbers as personae.

But only a rare 1.6 percent of the population has the MTS that can lead to intuiting others’ emotions and experiencing their physical sensations. The condition has been linked to special brain cells called mirror neurons; we all have them—they help us relate to others—but in someone like Pohlmann, they’re a superpower. “MTS goes beyond putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes,” she says. “It’s actually wearing the shoes for a while. It’s feeling the water splash from puddles. It’s feeling the wear and tear in the soles.”

Pohlmann was four when her mother remarried and she was adopted by her stepdad. Back then, no one was talking about MTS; it was only first documented in 2005. But her mother, Amanda Schaefer, says signs of Pohlmann’s synesthesia emerged early on. “When Megan’s sister was born, I was telling everybody that the baby’s name was Ashley Jean,” Schaefer says, “and Megan would say, ‘No, her name is Ashley Brown.’ She was four. J is brown for her.” When it came to feeling others’ emotions, “I just thought I was overly sensitive,” Pohlmann says. “I’d mirror my mother’s troubles and complex feelings I didn’t understand or know what to do with. Things would bother me so much more than they did other people. I would stress for someone else, and I couldn’t let it go because I would be so worried about them.”

It took some convincing but now I know I don’t have the regular gut intuition everyone else does—I have something extra.

Her urge to help eventually led her to nursing. “For a long time I wondered why I was drawn to this profession, when I could have explored my synesthesia through art or music,” she says. But that wouldn’t have connected her with other people as intensely; she realizes now that she excelled at her job early on because of her—then still undiagnosed—MTS. It was only six years ago that Pohlmann first read about MTS on the Internet and started reaching out to other synnies in Facebook groups. After diving into the studies, she contacted a team of synesthesia researchers in St. Louis who tested her and confirmed she has MTS—she wasn’t “just oversensitive,” as she’d so often been told.