Went to a good seminar today all about synaesthesia, progress in understanding it is coming thick and fast.. mostly it seems due to the guy who gave the talk – Jamie Ward (at least that’s his version!)
here’s some of the cool bits:
- patterns of inheritance suggest it is due to something on X chromosone.
- yet can get female MZ twins where one has it & other doesn’t
- colour-letter associations predict colour-word associations especially for 1st consonant and/or vowel (there are cases which demonstrate a dissociation.)
- yet taste-word associations are phoneme related (phoneme co-occurance) and moreover often tied to similar sounding foods (Russia ‘tastes like’ mushrooms, friday like fried egg! )
- can get stroop interference between percieved letter/number colour and it’s ink, or between tones and colours
- music/tone-colour association is almost exclusively found in presence of word/phoneme-colour association (rarely on its own) and it is significantly linked to formal musical education – parallel between learning letters and learning musical notation leading to the associations
- functional imaging shows some adjacency between taste-speech areas & colour-lexical areas
- exact neural mechanisms not known but Simon Baron-Cohen theory of lack of neonatal pruning of connections between adjacent areas is probably wrong… more likely that associations are via cross-modal connections to semantic or higher perceptual areas
more.. http://www.syn.ucl.ac.uk
