Extraordinary evidence generates extraordinary claims. I discuss the remarkable memory skills of chimpanzees tested in the Kyoto Primate Laboratory, and suggest a novel – but deflationary – hypothesis to explain them. Could the chimpanzees, who have been highly trained to learn the sequence of Arabic numerals, have developed number–colour synaesthesia?

For individuals with vision-touch synaesthesia, the sight of touch on another person elicits synaesthetic tactile sensation on the observer's own body. Here we used the traditional rubber hand paradigm (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998) and a no-touch rubber hand paradigm to investigate and to authenticate synaesthetic tactile sensation. In the traditional rubber hand paradigm, the participant views a...

Our brain constantly integrates signals across different senses. Auditory-visual synaesthesia is an unusual form of cross-modal integration in which sounds evoke involuntary visual experiences. Previous research primarily focuses on synaesthetic colour, but little is known about non-colour synaesthetic visual features. Here we studied a group of synaesthetes for whom sounds elicit consistent vi...

This paper discusses metaphor as a figure of speech first, and then talks about metaphor and synaesthesia from a cognitive perspective. In order to explain the metaphorical use of sense-impression in English, it borrows examples from some literary works. Finally, it draws the conclusion that metaphor has exerted a great influence on sense-impression in English.

INTRODUCTION Synaesthesia is a phenomenon in which a certain stimulus induces a concurrent sensory perception; it has an estimated prevalence of 4%. Sexual arousal as an inducer for synaesthetic perceptions is rarely mentioned in the literature but can be found sometimes in case reports about subjective orgasmic experiences. AIMS To examine whether synaesthetic perceptions during sexual inter...