Though synesthesia research has seen a huge growth in recent decades, and tremendous progress has been made in terms of understanding the mechanism and cause of synesthesia, we are still left mostly in the dark when it comes to the mechanistic commonalities (if any) among developmental, acquired and drug-induced synesthesia. We know that many forms of synesthesia involve aberrant structural or ...

Synesthesia, as a perceptual phenomenon and concept, has jumped out of the concept “senses” with development human-computer interaction. The Western exploration audiovisual art also ushered qualitative leap. According to social process, present study systematically sorted historical context synesthesia its experiments, paved way for follow-up synesthesia.

Synesthesia is a neurological condition that gives rise to unusual secondary sensations (e.g., reading letters might trigger the experience of colour). Testing the consistency of these sensations over long time intervals is the behavioural gold standard assessment for detecting synesthesia (e.g., Simner, Mulvenna et al., 2006). In 2007 however, Eagleman and colleagues presented an online 'Synes...

Synesthesia is a perceptual experience in which stimuli presented through one modality will spontaneously evoke sensations in an unrelated modality. The condition occurs from increased communication between sensory regions and is involuntary, automatic, and stable over time. While synesthesia can occur in response to drugs, sensory deprivation, or brain damage, research has largely focused on h...

Introduction: Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon experienced by a minority of individuals, with estimates ranging from 1 in 200 1 to 1 in 250,000. 2 Synesthesia may be understood as perceiving one sensory stimulus (such as sound) by more than one sensory modality (such as sight, taste, touch, or smell). 3 This would elicit, for example, a sound being both heard and tasted at the same time...

A vicarious experience is an empathetic state in response to the observation of others’ sensations, emotions, and actions (Keysers and Gazzola, 2009). Vicarious experiences in response to social stimuli are quite common in the general healthy population and they may even constitute an important basis for social behavior. Interestingly, vicarious experiences recruit similar neural processes as t...

Currently, little is known about how synesthesia develops and which aspects of synesthesia can be acquired through a learning process. We review the increasing evidence for the role of semantic representations in the induction of synesthesia, and argue for the thesis that synesthetic abilities are developed and modified by semantic mechanisms. That is, in certain people semantic mechanisms asso...

In synesthesia, certain stimuli ("inducers") may give rise to perceptual experience in additional modalities not normally associated with them ("concurrent"). For example, color-grapheme synesthetes automatically perceive achromatic numbers as colored (e.g., 7 is turquoise). Although synesthetes know when a given color matches the one evoked by a certain number, colors do not automatically give...

Synesthesia provides an elegant model to investigate neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in subjective experience in humans. In grapheme-color synesthesia, written letters induce color sensations, accompanied by activation of color area V4. Competing hypotheses suggest that enhanced V4 activity during synesthesia is either induced by direct bottom-up cross-activation from graphe...