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Speaker: |
Julia Simner, University of
Edinburgh
For people with synaesthesia, everyday activities such as
reading, listening to music, etc. give rise to extra-ordinary experiences of
colour, tastes and more. For example, smelling food may trigger the
experience of touch against the hand or reading words give rise to the
perceptual experience of taste in the mouth. Other common variants include
'grapheme-colour synaesthesia' in which letters and numbers trigger
sensations of colour, or 'visuo-spatial synaesthesia' in which time
sequences (e.g., months, days) are seen in specific shapes or patterns in
space.
Synaesthesia has a known family transmission pattern, and has
been traced to increased structural connectivity in the brains of
synaesthetes. In this talk Julia will describe her work examining the
cognitive and developmental basis of synaesthesia, and what the phenomenon
might tell us about the functioning of perception, memory and language more
generally. |
