fuck yeah Synesthesia

fuckyeahneuroscience:

An anonymous messenger dropped by asking for some recent papers on synaesthesia so I’ll compile a few here into one post.

This 2009 article discusses whether we are all born synaesthetes and then lose that ability, or whether synaesthesia appears due to some learning process during development….

An anonymous messenger dropped by asking for some recent papers on synaesthesia so I’ll compile a few here into one post.

This 2009 article discusses whether we are all born synaesthetes and then lose that ability, or whether synaesthesia appears due to some learning process during development. 

The question why synaesthesia, an atypical binding within or between modalities, occurs is both enduring and important. Two explanations have been provided: (1) a congenital explanation: we are all born as synaesthetes but most of us subsequently lose the experience due to brain development; (2) a learning explanation: synaesthesia is related to some learning process during childhood. Three recent studies provide conflicting support for these explanations. …

Here’s a 2008 study about the basis for lexical-gustatory (word-taste) synaesthesia which focuses on linguistic concepts and sensory activation to figure out how and which kind of words elicit a synaesthetic response. 

We manipulated the characteristics of non-words to provide three types of evidence that non-word tastes in fact stem from real word neighbours: Non-words with neighbours (e.g., keach) are more likely to generate tastes than those with no neighbours (e.g., vilps); pseudo-homophone non-words that are orthographically close to real words (e.g., peeple) are more likely to generate tastes than those that are more distant (baybee); and finally, the tastes of non-words are less consistent, and less intense, than those of real words. …

Also in 2008, another paper aimed at outlining behavioural detection markers for synaesthesia, making it easier to discover the condition in children. 

We show that the neurological condition of synaesthesia—which causes fundamental differences in perception and cognition throughout a lifetime—is significantly represented within the childhood population, and that it manifests behavioural markers as young as age 6 years. We demonstrate that the onset of this systematicity can be detected in young grapheme-colour synaesthetes, but is an acquired trait with a protracted development. We show that grapheme-colour synaesthesia develops in a way that supersedes the cognitive growth of non-synaesthetic children (with both average and superior abilities) in a comparable paired association task. …

Here, a research group (2010) carried out an ERP (event-related brain potential) study to determine whether the experience of synaesthesia could be disrupted by posthypnotic suggestion.

Also on synaesthetic suppression, in October 2010 a study was carried out on the bidirectionality of grapheme-colour synaesthesia and whether it could be eliminated by parieto-occipital suppression using transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques.

In this study we tested whether bidirectional implicit activation is mediated by the same brain areas as explicit synaesthetic experiences. Specifically, we demonstrated suppression of implicit bidirectional activation with the application of transcranial magnetic stimulation over parieto-occipital brain areas. Our findings indicate that parieto-occipital regions are not only involved in explicit but also implicit synaesthetic binding. 

And lastly, this study from 2010 focuses on the higher prevalence of synaesthesia in art students and its facilitation of creativity. It is a statistical study on the number of grapheme-colour synaesthetes in two samples, art students and controls. Not the most extensive or insightful but still noteworthy. 

I’m sure there are plenty more if you go on the hunt yourselves but if you want pdfs of any of the above articles, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do!

“… one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one.”

typewritertea:

My fascination with synesthesia only grows.

Here is an excellent summation of it.

eximago:

The term Khoisan is actually a unifying term for two similar groups: the foraging San and pastoral Khoi.

One thing you might notice is their surprisingly light skin tone for being a southern African group. They’re also rather short, averaging from 4’9” to 5’4” with long legs and torsos,…

“Genetic studies have shown that the Khoisan are likely to be the first ethnic group to split from the rest of Homo sapiens as we spread across the globe.”

Wicked awesome. I want to live with this tribe.