magazine issue 10 2007 / Issue 5

There’s Something About Zero

• written by Clare Jonas

There are other uses of synaesthesia research, but (as is appropriate for a social psychology magazine) I have chosen a final use that has social applications. Most people still aren’t aware of synaesthesia, and so it’s frustrating for children who have it to be told that they are lying, or worse, psychotic (Day, 2005). The better synaesthesia is understood, and the more widespread knowledge about it becomes, the lower the chances of this happening. If someone tells you that an insect sting is jagged orange, that a cake smells dome-shaped, or the word “magical” is green, don’t brush their words aside as mere metaphor. They probably have synaesthesia.

References

Cytowic, R.E. (1993). The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Day, S. (2005). Some Demographic and Socio-cultural Aspects of Synaesthesia. In Robertson, L.C. and Sagiv, N. (Eds) (2005).Synesthesia: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience. Oxford: UP.

Dixon, M.J., Smilek, D. and Merikle, P.M. (2004). Not all synaesthetes are created equal: Projector versus associator synaesthetes. Cognitive, Affective and Behavioural Neuroscience, 4, 335-343.

Larner, A.J. (2006). A Possible Account of Synaesthesia Dating from the Seventeenth Century. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 15, 245-249.

Ramachandran, V.S. and Hubbard, E.M. (2001b). Synaesthesia – A Window Into Perception, Thought and Language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, 3-34.

Rich, A.N., Williams, M.A., Puce, A., Syngeniotis, A., Howard, M.A., McGlone, F. and Mattingley, J.B. (2006). Neural correlates of imagined and synaesthetic colours. Neuropsychologia, 44, 2918-2925.

Sagiv, N., Simner, J., Colins, J., Butterworth, B. and Ward, J. (2006). What is the Relationship between Synaesthesia and Visuo-Spatial Number Forms? Cognition, 101, 114-128.

Simner, J. and Hubbard, E.M. (2006). Variants of synesthesia interact in cognitive tasks: Evidence for implicit associations and late connectivity in cross-talk theories. Neuroscience, 143, 805-814.

Simner, J., Mulvenna, C., Sagiv, N., Tsakanikos, E., Witherby, S.A., Fraser, C., Scott, K., and Ward, J. (2006). Synaesthesia: The prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences. Perception, 35, 1024-1033.>br>

Smilek, D., Callejas, A., Dixon, M.J. and Merikle, P.M. (2006). Ovals of time: Time-space associations in synaesthesia.Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2006.06.013.

Sperling, J.M., Prvulovic, D., Linden, D.E.J., Singer, W. and Stirn, A. (2006). Neuronal correlates of colour-graphemic synaesthesia: A fMRI study. Cortex, 42, 295-303.

Ward, J., Li, R., Salih, S. and Sagiv, N. (2006). Varieties of grapheme-colour synaesthesia: A new theory of phenomenological and behavioural differences. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2006.09.012.

Ward, J., Simner, J. and Auyeung, V. (2005). A comparison of lexical-gustatory and grapheme-colour synaesthesia. Cognitive Neurospychology, 22, 28-41.