SYNESTHESIA
Synesthesia is an unusual concsious experience, in which stimulation of one sensory modality leads to a sensory experience in a second, unstimulated sensory modality. For example, seeing letters might lead some people to see colors. Others report that the days of the week or months of the year are arranged like a map in space. Still others report that hearing voices or music cause them to see colors, or that hearing words makes them taste foods...in fact, almost any sensory modality can be involved in synesthesia.
Although synesthesia was first described in the 1880's, research into this phenomenon has recently undergone something of a rebirth. Our research was the first to clearly demonstrate that, at least for some synesthetes, seeing colors when looking at letters and numbers is a real perceptual phenomenon (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001a). Since that time, researchers around the world have become interested in synesthesia.
My previous laboratory at UC San Diego specifically examines grapheme-color synesthesia, in which people see colors when looking at letters and numbers. In my current post-doctoral work, I am studying what is referred to as "sequence forms" in which numbers (and other sequences, like days of the week and months of the year) are experienced as having a spatial form. Sometimes these number sequence forms are colored, sometimes not.
We are continuing to explore the experiences of synesthetes, and the neural basis of synesthesia through a combination of psychophysical experiments and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
If you experience any form of synesthesia, and would be interested in participating in our research, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.
Edward M. Hubbard
NUMBRA Post-Doctoral Fellow
INSERM Unité 562
Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit
CEA/SAC/DSV/I2BM/NeuroSpin
Bât 145, Point courrier 156
91191 Gif-Sur-Yvette, France