Eight people have been killed in the typhoon-ravaged central Philippines after thousands of Haiyan survivors stormed a government-owned rice warehouse seeking food supplies.

The Philippines National Food Authority said police and soldiers stood by helpless as people streamed into the warehouse in Alangalang, Leyte province – an area where hunger and desperation are running high after Haiyan made landfall early on Friday morning, ravaging vast swaths of Leyte and Samar islands. The security forces could only watch as more than 100,000 sacks of rice were carried away.

The eight were crushed to death when a wall in the warehouse collapsed, spokesman Rex Estoperez told the Associated Press. Other rice warehouses were dotted around the region, he said, refusing to give their locations for security reasons.

The Philippines government has come under fire for failing to deliver aid adequately or quickly enough, with growing frustration in the hardest hit areas, such as Tacloban, the capital of Leyte province where dead bodies have piled up on the streets and residents have resorted to looting to find food.

A military official told the Guardian on Wednesday that the government was aiming to double its relief efforts within the next two days. Attempts to provide help were buoyed by the expected arrival of two extra US military C-130 planes and one additional Australian air force plane.

Three relief distribution points were being set up in the Leyte island towns of Tacloban, Guiuan and Ormoc, the official said, with the main aid effort operating out of neighbouring Cebu instead of Manila, the capital, which is 360 miles to the north.

More than 10,000 people are feared to have been killed in the Philippines due to Haiyan, most of them in Leyte province, with aid workers suggesting that number may rise significantly. As many as 29 municipalities have still not been reached due to impassable roads and downed telecommunications.

President Benigno Aquino III said on Tuesday that he believed the number killed to be far lower – around 2,500 – and told CNN that the 10,000 figure may have come from an "emotional" official, with government figures alleging that the death toll stands at 2,275. The UN has said more than 670,000 people have been displaced and a total of 11.3 million people directly affected by the super storm.

International relief efforts intensified with the launch of a UN appeal and the dispatch of American, British and Japanese troops to the affected regions. But minimal amounts of aid have reached the worst‑hit areas.

More than 3,000 people surged on to the tarmac of Tacloban airport on Tuesday morning in the hope of flying out on the two Philippine air force planes that had just arrived.

Babies and sick or elderly people were given priority but only a few hundred were able to leave. Others were held back by soldiers and police. Many had walked for hours and camped at the base overnight.

"I was pleading with the soldiers. I was kneeling and begging because I have diabetes," said Helen Cordial as she lay on a stretcher, shaking. "Do they want me to die in this airport? They are stone-hearted," she told the Associated Press.

Dean Smith, an Australian who has been living with his family near Palo, Leyte province, for the last five years, told the Guardian that he waited eight hours to be able to get one of the first commercial flights out of Tacloban to Cebu. On the way to the airport he said he saw "horrifying things that I know I have seen but my brain hasn't processed yet".

He described scenes of chaos in the city centre, where police were stealing money from the local cashpoints, people in cars were refusing to drive the injured to get help, and the bloated body of a man floating in dirty water was being gnawed at by a dog.

"What people have gone through, what they have seen – there is going to be a lot of post-traumatic stress after this event I assure you," he said shakily. "No one has ever seen anything like this."

Having arrived on Tuesday in Cebu, Smith was planning to stock up on food, medicine and water and take it back to his Palo home, where his wife, six children, a 92-year-old grandmother and a pregnant nanny were all desperately awaiting supplies. He departed for Tacloban early on Wednesday morning.

Domestic and international relief efforts were being hampered by wet weather, poor communications and damaged infrastructure, with aircraft only able to land in Tacloban during daylight hours because the air control tower had been destroyed by Haiyan. Unsubstantiated reports of aid convoys being attacked by hungry victims circulated, with the Telegraph reporting that communist rebels had been killed whilst trying to intercept a Red Cross convoy destined for the island of Samar.

Still, Corizon Soliman, secretary of the Philippine department of social welfare and development, said aid had so far reached a third of the city's 45,000 families.

However armed forces spokesman Ramon Zagala told the BBC that relief workers were struggling to deliver aid for a number of reasons.

"The area is very vast and the number of helicopters – although we have a lot of helicopters at the moment – it's really a challenge for us to bring [aid] to all the places and [bring] the number of goods that are needed."

The BBC quoted a Leyte official as saying that although relief goods like medicine and equipment were arriving into the province "it's just not reaching the people affected".

The UN released $25m (£15.7m) in emergency funds for shelter materials and household items, and for assistance with emergency health services, safe water supplies and sanitation.

The UN aid chief, Valerie Amos, launched an appeal for $300m as she arrived in Manila. "We have deployed specialist teams, vital logistics support and dispatched critical supplies but we have to do more and faster," she said.

The US, Britain, Japan, Australia and other nations have pledged tens of millions of dollars in immediate aid, and some businesses have also offered help: banking group HSBC announced a $1m (£630,000) cash donation.

In Tacloban shops were stripped of food and water by hungry residents. While some tents had arrived, the widespread damage left many people sleeping in the ruins of their homes or under shredded trees.

Military doctors at a makeshift clinic at the airport said they had treated about 1,000 people for cuts, bruises and deep wounds but did not have enough medical supplies.

"It's overwhelming," said Antonio Tamayo, an air force captain. "We need more medicine. We can't give anti-tetanus vaccine shots because we have none."

The typhoon flattened Basey, a seaside town in Samar province about six miles across a bay from Tacloban. About 2,000 people were missing there, its governor said. Rescue and relief workers were yet to reach many of the more remote areas.

"There are hundreds of other towns and villages stretched over thousands of kilometres that were in the path of the typhoon and with which all communication has been cut," said Natasha Reyes, emergency co-ordinator in the Philippines at Médecins Sans Frontières. "No one knows what the situation is like in these more rural and remote places, and it's going to be some time before we have a full picture."

Damage to communications left the armed forces struggling to reach local authorities and many officials were dead, missing or trying to protect their own families.

"Basically the only branch of government that is working here is the military," Ruben Guinolbay, a Philippine army captain, told Reuters in Tacloban. "That is not good. We are not supposed to take over government."

The interior secretary, Manuel Roxas, said on Tuesday that only 20 of Tacloban's 293 police had arrived for work. But he added: "Today we have stabilised the situation. There are no longer reports of looting. The food supply is coming in. Up to 50,000 food packs are coming in every day, with each pack able to feed up to a family of five for three days."

A team of British medical experts and the first consignment of aid from the UK was leaving for the Philippines, David Cameron said on Tuesday.
 The UK surgical team, led by Anthony Redmond, Manchester University professor of international emergency medicine, includes three emergency physicians, two orthopaedic surgeons, a plastic surgeon, two accident and emergency nurses, a theatre nurse, two anaesthetists and one specialist physiotherapist.

The USS George Washington aircraft carrier, transporting about 5,000 sailors and more than 80 aircraft, plus four other US navy ships, should arrive in two to three days, the Pentagon said.

Britain's HMS Daring, a warship with equipment to make drinking water from seawater, and a military transport aircraft should arrive around the same time.

Japan is sending a team of 40 from its self-defence force.

Aquino has declared a state of national calamity, allowing the central government to release emergency funds more quickly and impose price controls.

Initial estimates of the cost of the damage vary widely, with a report from German-based CEDIM Forensic Disaster Analysis putting the total at anywhere from $8bn to $19bn.

Let's call her "Kaylee." Her Mom says that's OK. The young Texan chose the pseudonym herself, taking it from a character who talks to machines on Fox's "Firefly" science fiction series. But this Kaylee is not a fiction. And as this teen synesthete is underage and still living in a world that doesn't quite understand her trait, we've decided to protect her identity. It is also important to note that she didn't seek publicity. I sought her out after learning about her in the synesthesia community.

Kaylee just gave me an astonishing interview in which she described synesthesia related to machinery. Of the 60 or more types of synesthesias now identified, it seems to most correspond to mirror-touch in which someone literally feels the pain or emotion of another—but until now, that "other" was usually human. I recall talking with the gifted Russian psychologist, synesthesia researcher and coordinator of the website of the Russian synesthesia community,  Dr. Anton Sidoroff-Dorso, about how synesthesia seems to be evolving with technology. Of all our many cross-associations, it seems that we can blend senses with nearly any stimulus, including brand new ones. But frankly, Kaylee's case goes beyond anything I'd previously imagined.

Teen girl silhouette by Mike Baird

Kaylee has empathy for the inanimate. Image: Mike Baird.
"If this case can be verified, I will rank it most revealing about human nature! This is because of the degree that we can 'appropriate' the observable world, even to the extent of empathising with non-living things. Animation of non-living objects, the elements or natural phenomena, personification in rituals, emotional attachment to, repulsion from or even identification with robots and machinery can be found far and wide in fiction and anthropology. In psychology (and in Russian psychology in particular) the issue of tool use is interpreted as a phenomenological and functional incorporation of a certain instrument as part of one's body that leads to indiscriminate manipulation of the tool as (if) one's own limb and body scheme. The process occurs in stages, and the rubber hand illusion draws much on that (so, it is more than sensory integration). Recent neuroscientific studies have demonstrated that the human brain reacts very much similarly to maltreatment of a robot toy as it experiences abuse of a human - the same limbic areas light up.

"So, the case you are talking about can be contemplated as ultimate phenomenological and functional integration - that is, empathic or emotional integration. Generally, in humans it seems to happen for reasons of (re)adaptation when one embarks on charting a new and yet unbeknownst existential territory. As we know that synaesthetic reactions idiosyncratically supervenes on multifarious types of cognitive categorisation, it comes as little surprise that some synaesthetic individuals will evince their unusual perceptions in relation to gadgetry as well, because in the age of ubiquitous computing human beings are more and more beginning to see 'artificial' as 'natural' since one is knee-high, and, for this reason, this synaesthetic type of meaning making will start embracing animated electronic appliances and anthropomorphised robots from very early on. To stretch it a bit far, analysing the ways of enlivening the world synaesthetically, we can describe this case of empathy-based synaesthesia as bot-bond synaesthesia."

Kaylee's case raises so many interesting questions. While the current discussion is about when computers will achieve parity with humans, perhaps humans are evolving toward machines?

I thank this brave and fascinating young woman, and her caring mother, for shedding light on her experiences in the following Q&A:



Which machines do you feel an affinity for? Can you describe the touch and movement sensations?

I feel a connection to pretty much everything with some kind of mechanically-powered moving part.  This includes cars, robots, escalators, locks, levers, etc.

Since I was a kid, I’ve learned to “tune out” or ignore most machines and other synesthetic reactions to the best of my ability, both to appear normal and to reduce interrupting sensations.

The best analogy I can use to explain it is a radio. My senses are my radio, picking up stimulus and playing it back in my brain, and various machines are radio stations I can tune in on. For example, if I’m in a mall, surrounded by escalators, elevators, motor vehicles, clocks, and other junk, they’re too many stations for my “radio” to process. Unlike most forms of synesthesia, this doesn’t result in a sensory overload - in fact, it’s exactly the opposite. I feel no machine-touch reaction, like my senses are too overwhelmed to process anything. The only way I can “tune in” to a machine in this situation is by focusing on one thing in particular, and ignoring my surroundings. If there’s only one machine in my field of vision, then it’s automatically my focus.

The way I feel the movement of a machine depends mostly on where the machine is positioned in relation to my body. If it’s somewhere near me but not touching me, or if I’m touching it but not influenced by it, then it’s as if the machine is an extra limb, or an extension of me. I feel and am aware of my own body and the fact that I am not the machine; no part of the machine is analogous to a part of my body. It’s as if the machine and I are connected, and I can feel what it feels through that lens without actually “becoming” it. The more extreme the movement is, the stronger I feel it. For example, when watching cars crash in a movie, I feel them as they’re ripped and crush, and I usually have to turn away and cut myself off from the stimulus.

This is different, however, when I am in or on the machine, and directly influenced by its motion, like when I’m riding in a car or on a boat. Then, I am the machine, in a traditional mirror-touch experience. I feel accelerating as a shift of balance (the more rapid the acceleration, the more severe the shift) in my lower body/feet, as if I am standing and leaning forward, about to fall. When the car begins to brake, I feel as if my arms are extended in front of me, and my hands and wrist and flexing up.

What other forms of synesthesia do you have? Do any other members of your family experience it as well?

I have grapheme-color (associative), personality-color (associative), color-number (associative), sound-touch, sound-kinetic, and sometimes mirror-touch reactions to people, but not often. I don’t talk about synesthesia with my extended family much, so I’m not sure whether or not any of them have it. I know my stepmother used to have graphmeme-color syn, but it faded in her early twenties.

When did you realize you were a synesthete? What were your earliest synesthetic experiences?

My senses have always been pretty screwed up, but I didn’t know I actually had synesthesia until I read an article about it from a science blog I follow on Tumblr. The earliest true synesthetic reaction I can remember having was in first grade, when my class was learning about the senses. The teacher was giving examples of sensations and asking us to identify what senses we perceived them with, and I tried to argue that people “feel” their dogs barking and scratching at the door.

How has it been for you describing synesthesia to other people? How do friends, family, teachers, react?

I haven’t had too much of a problem explaining synesthesia to people. With my family, I can usually cite times I had problems with my senses as a child, and explain that it’s actually a semi-common phenomenon. My friends think it’s a little weird, but they generally go with the flow and tend to enjoy quizzing me on the colors of various people, words, and numbers. I haven’t tried explaining synesthesia to my teachers, but I do remember a teacher in 8th grade telling a story about a synesthete she once taught.

What do you think synesthesia means? Is it useful to you?

My synesthesia is helpful when trying to remember long streams of numbers or words, and it also gives me a better understanding of physics and mechanical designs.

What would you like to do professionally one day? What are your hobbies?

Professionally, I’d prefer to do some kind of science or engineering. At the moment I favor mechanical engineering, but I’m a sophomore in high school so that’ll most likely change by the time I graduate. I enjoy reading, playing tennis, and graphic design. I’m also on a team that competes in FIRST robotics, an engineering competition for high school students.

I wonder what you think synesthesia means to human evolution? Why do you think we are like this?

Frankly, I don't think I've done enough research about synesthesia to provide a defensible scientific answer. I do believe that synesthesia gives people a unique perspective, which can be beneficial in any discussion, especially in today's society.

Please describe how you feel for a lock, a lever and other devices you mentioned besides cars.

Locks are very, very cool. They're very elegant in their design, and they serve their purpose well. When using a lock on a door, I feel aware of the pins rising and falling against the key as if I'm running my finger under them instead of a key. When watching or manipulating a lever in action, I feel and am aware of the forces acting on it. When on an escalator, I feel the movement of the steps on the conveyor as if they're the notches up my spine, and the arm rest as the skin at the top of my upper arm and shoulder. Clocks are so delicate and minute in their design and visible movement I barely feel them tickle the hair on my arms. Robots that have the typical rectangular drive train feel like cars, just smaller. Ironically, robots that have been designed to look like/mimic human bodies are stranger to connect to, because their similarity to my already-existing limbs is confusing.