Synaesthesia is the involuntary physical experience of a crossmodal linkage such as when hearing a tone evokes the additional sensation of seeing a colour. We previously described a professional musician with absolute pitch perception who experiences both different tastes in response to hearing different tone intervals (e.g., major third and sweet) and the more common tone-colour synaesthesia i...

Grapheme-color synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which particular graphemes, such as the numeral 9, automatically induce the simultaneous perception of a particular color, such as the color red. To test whether the concurrent color sensations in grapheme-color synaesthesia are treated as meaningful stimuli, we recorded event-related brain potentials as 8 synaesthetes and 8 matched co...

A case of 'chromatic-lexical' (colour-word) synaesthesia is described, and its genuineness confirmed using the criterion of stable cross-modality imagery across time. The synaesthesia could not be accounted for by a memory hypothesis, nor was it associated with any psychiatric condition. Further analysis did not identify any semantic relationship between real words and colours, but the colours ...

Memory has been shown to be enhanced in grapheme-color synaesthesia, and this enhancement extends to certain visual stimuli (that don't induce synaesthesia) as well as stimuli comprised of graphemes (which do). Previous studies have used a variety of testing procedures to assess memory in synaesthesia (e.g., free recall, recognition, associative learning) making it hard to know the extent to wh...

biologist in Singapore? Singapore is an extremely attractive place to live and work for both Asians and non-Asians. English is spoken by everyone and it has become a very appealing place for Asian (typically, but not exclusively, Chinese and Indian) and non-Asian (from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand) researchers trained elsewhere to move to. For the Asians, this is home or clo...

Although the study of multisensory processes and the study of synaesthesia both represent burgeoning fields of inquiry, there has been little attempt to bridge between these two research topics. This is somewhat surprising, as these two are undoubtedly heavily interrelated from both a psychological and neuroscience perspective. The goal of the present issue is explore these interrelationships, ...

Early development is characterized by a period of exuberant neural connectivity followed by a retraction and reweighting of connections over the course of development. It has been proposed that this connectivity may facilitate arbitrary sensory experiences in infants that are unlike anything experienced by typical adults but are similar to the sensory experiences of adults with synaesthesia, a ...