For many people, thinking about certain types of common sequence – for example calendar units or numerals – elicits a vivid experience that the sequence members occupy spatial locations which are in turn part of a larger spatial pattern of sequence members. Recent research on these visuospatial experiences has usually considered them to be a variety of synaesthesia, and many studies have argued...

In synaesthesia, ordinary stimuli elicit extraordinary conscious experiences. For example, standard black digits may elicit highly specific colour experiences and specific tastes may elicit unusual tactile sensations. The growing interest in synaesthesia has led to numerous experimental studies of this phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is to review these recent studies and to discuss the re...

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 rec...

Synaesthesia is often triggered by numbers, although it is conceivable that different aspects of numerical representation are responsible for different variants of synaesthesia. For individuals with "higher synaesthesia" it is assumed that number meaning (or numerosity) is responsible for the elicitation of synaesthetic experiences. This study documents a case study of a synaesthete, TD, who br...

BACKGROUND Synaesthesia is a neurodevelopmental condition in which a sensation in one modality triggers a perception in a second modality. Autism (shorthand for Autism Spectrum Conditions) is a neurodevelopmental condition involving social-communication disability alongside resistance to change and unusually narrow interests or activities. Whilst on the surface they appear distinct, they have b...

Coloured hearing synaesthesia (from the Greek syn [union] and aisthesls [sensation]), has been known to the scientific community for over 300 years and yet has gone relatively unlnvestigated. In this revlew we chart recent research Into the various forms of synaesthesia and contrast accounts of acquired and developmental forms of the condition. We also revlew the competing theories proposed to ...

We investigated grapheme–colour synaesthesia and found that: (1) The induced colours led to perceptual grouping and pop-out, (2) a grapheme rendered invisible through ‘crowding’ or lateral masking induced synaesthetic colours — a form of blindsight — and (3) peripherally presented graphemes did not induce colours even when they were clearly visible. Taken collectively, these and other experimen...

The commentaries by Shanon (2003) and Pribram (2003) on our original article (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001) are stimulating and make a valuable contribution to the knowledge and thinking about synaesthesia, and indeed the mind in general. We were gratified to see the overall level of agreement with our general framework. For example, both of the authors endorse our connection between the percep...

This study compares two different profiles of synaesthesia. One group (N = 7) experiences synaesthetic colour and the other (N = 7) experiences taste. Both groups are significantly more consistent over time than control subjects asked to generate analogous associations. For the colour synaesthetes, almost every word elicits a colour photism and there are systematic relationships between the col...

This paper explores the nature of linguistic synaesthesia in the auditory domain through a corpus-based lexical semantic study of near synonyms. It has been established that the near synonyms 聲 sheng “sound” and 音 yin “sound” in Mandarin Chinese have different semantic functions in representing auditory production and auditory perception respectively. Thus, our study is devoted to testing wheth...