Synesthesia

Taste and smell conflicts when food is the wrong color

-7-up dyed red tastes like cranberry or cherry soda -green colored pancakes tend to be judged as less tasty then yellow colored pancakes even when the taste is the same

Case of SB

-blind from birth until age 52 when he received a corneal transplant and regained his sight -he never regained normal visual abilities because his visual system didn't have the benefit of development in first few critical months of life -one of the biggest problems for him was watching the view of an object changed as he rotated it in his hands (couldn't integrate vision with touch)

Chromographemia

-numbers or letters elicit the perception of colors

How to test Chromographemia?

-show mixture of 2s and 5s to normal and synesthetes and see how long it takes them to find the 2s RESULTS -a synesthetic takes much less time because the 2s pop out -normal person much longer because they have to do an item by item search

Two characteristics of chromagraphemia

-synesthesia experience can depend on the visual appearance and not the underlying concept -or can depend on the underlying concept and not the visual appearance

Characteristics of Synesthesia

-the joined sensation is vivid and involuntary (hear sound, see color) -the synesthetic perception is very stable within a person (certain word evokes a color then it will always evoke that same color)

Biological factors of synesthesia (4)

1. Neural cross-connections between senses in the brain 2. Limbic system is activated during synesthetic experiences involving emotions 3. Perceived synesthetic sensation activates the same portions of the brain that the actual sensation would activate 4. Similar brain patterns as with LSD experience

Amount of people with synesthesia.

About 1 in 25,000 has it

What is the most common form of synesthesia?

Chromographemia

What is essential for the proper development of the neurons?

experience

Intermodal neurons respond to both sight and touch

fire when see an object at particular part of the body, but also fire when just touched object at the part of body

Young infants and pacifier

infants given a pacifier of a particular shape to suck on, prefer looking at a picture of that shape than a picture of a different shape. -"preferential looking": indicates they can visually recognize what they only felt before

What happens when there is a discrepancy between the information from two or more senses?

Since vision is dominant in humans, when there is discrepancy between vision and another sense, vision generally wins.

What is one theory of synesthesia?

Some believe it is the result of the senses not fully separating during development -but if this is true then all babies would have synesthetic type of experiences very early on.

Is it possible all people have synesthesia to some extent?

Yes, perhaps it's just a rare manifestation of our normal sensory integration abilities. -it's normal for people to identify things like high-pitched tones as bright or low-pitched tones as dark.

Synesthesia

a neurological condition in which one sense modality is involuntarily elicited by another sense modality

What appear to play a role in what synesthetic experience is elicited?

attention to the stimulus

Synesthesia- smelling sounds

certain scents also produce the perception of sounds

intermodal perception

perception that integrates two or more senses

Synesthesia- hearing colors

sounds will also produce a visual experience of color and/or shape

Synesthesia- tasting shapes

taste will also elicit the perception of a shape

How do synesthetic perceptions differ across people?

the color elicited by sounds for one person may differ from the color elicited by another person

Synesthesia- the perception is projected

the evoked perception appears to close to the body as if projected on a screen in front of them

Conflicts in movie theaters

we perceive the sound of the voice as coming from the actors mouths while they are really coming from the speakers at the sides of the theater

What is the genetic link for synesthesia?

x-linked dominant trait -twice as many women then men

Synesthesia-the perception is generic

-BASIC -images and sounds evoked by synesthesia are simple shapes, panes of color, tones, or humans. (not complicated)

What are two traits that are typically common in synesthetes?

-almost exclusively right-handers -seven times more common in creative people

The integration of senses appears to be?

Innate or learned very early on.

Its there a treatment for synesthesia?

No physical treatment available, but psychological treatment can help someone better live with it -most people don't want to get rid of it because they see it as a gift