Crossmodal binding usually relies on bottom-up stimulus characteristics such as spatial and temporal correspondence. However, in case of ambiguity the brain has to decide whether to combine or segregate sensory inputs. We hypothesise that widespread, subtle forms of synesthesia provide crossmodal mapping patterns which underlie and influence multisensory perception. Our aim was to investigate i...

Studying cognitive processes underlying synesthesia, a condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality automatically leads to abnormal additional sensory perception, allows insights into the neural mechanisms of normal and abnormal cross-modal sensory processing. Consistent with the notion that synesthesia results from hyperconnectivity, functional connectivity analysis (adopting indepen...

13 Abstract: Synesthesia is a psychological phenomenon where sensory signals become mixed. Input to one sensory modality produces an experience in a second, unstimulated modality. In “grapheme-color synesthesia", viewed letters and numbers evoke mental imagery of colors. The study of this condition has implications for increasing our understanding of brain architecture and function, language, m...

Synesthesia is commonly thought to be a phenomenon of fixed associations between an outside inducer and a vivid concurrent experience. Hence, it has been proposed that synesthesia occurs due to additional connections in the brain with which synesthetes are born. Here we show that synesthesia can be a much richer and more flexible phenomenon with a capability to creatively construct novel synest...

Synesthesia is a condition in which perceptual or cognitive stimuli (e.g., a written letter) trigger atypical additional percepts (e.g., the color yellow). Although these cross-modal pairings appear idiosyncratic in that they superficially differ from synesthete to synesthete, underlying patterns do exist and these can, in some circumstances, reflect the cross-modal intuitions of nonsynesthetes...

Synesthesia is an unusual condition characterized by the over-binding of two or more features and the concomitant automatic and conscious experience of atypical, ancillary images or perceptions. Previous research suggests that synesthetes display enhanced modality-specific perceptual processing, but it remains unclear whether enhanced processing contributes to conscious awareness of color photi...

Absolute pitch (AP) and synesthesia are two uncommon cognitive traits that reflect increased neuronal connectivity and have been anecdotally reported to occur together in an individual. Here we systematically evaluate the occurrence of synesthesia in a population of 768 subjects with documented AP. Out of these 768 subjects, 151 (20.1%) reported synesthesia, most commonly with color. These self...

Synesthesia is a condition where stimulation of a single sensory modality or processing stream elicits an idiosyncratic, yet reliable perception in one or more other modalities or streams. Various models have been proposed to explain synesthesia, which have in common aberrant cross-activation of one cortical area by another. This has been observed directly in cases of linguistic-color synesthes...

poetry is usually the result of poet’s experiences and observations. many of these experiences and findings are not reached through a single sense. to express and transfer such cases, a poet needs to impact different senses of the reader at the same time. one way to do this is through synesthesia. this rhetorical ornament can be achieved by using the word related to a sense about another. thi...

In recent years several studies have documented a near-universal tendency to vicariously represent the actions and sensations of others (e.g., see Keysers and Gazzola, 2009 for review). For example, observing another person experiencing pain activates neural regions involved in experiencing pain (e.g., Singer et al., 2004; Avenanti et al., 2005) or observing somebody being touched recruits regi...