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Yellow-tasting sounds? The cross-sensory world of synaesthesia| old_uid | 9068 |
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| title | Yellow-tasting sounds? The cross-sensory world of synaesthesia |
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| start_date | 2010/09/21 |
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| schedule | 15h45-17h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | room 1.63 |
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| summary | For a small portion of the population, the experience of colour, taste, and other sensory sensations, can arise without the usual external stimulation. Some of these individuals have a condition known as synaesthesia. People with synaesthesia experience unusual perceptions (e.g., colours, tastes) when engaged in everyday activities like reading, speaking, listening to music, and so on. Synaesthetes might see colours when they hear sounds, for example (music-colour synaesthesia; Ward et al., 2006) or experience tastes in the mouth when they read words (lexical-gustatory synaesthesia; Simner & Ward, 2006; Ward & Simner, 2003) and so on. Synaesthesia has a genetic basis (Asher et al., 2009) and this inheritance is assumed to give rise to neuro-developmental differences in the brain maturation of synaesthetes. Brain imaging studies on adult synaesthetes now reveal differences in both function and structure (e.g., Rouw & Scholte, 2007; Hubbard et al., 2005). In this talk, I will describe work on synaesthesia from the Synaesthesia and Sensory Integration Lab at Edinburgh University, where we examine the cognitive, linguistic, neural and developmental basis of this unusual condition. These data contribute to the emerging view that synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes lie on a continuum of cross-sensory association, but where neuro-developmental differences allow synaesthetes to experience these cross-modal perceptual qualities to a conscious level. |
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| responsibles | Zondervan |
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