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They also looked at the brains of 18 non-synesthetes.ĭTI stands for diffusion tensor imaging. The researchers used a method called DTI to scan the brains of 18 people with synesthesia. Thomas SchultzWikimedia Commons ( CC BY-SA 3.0) Last summer, a group of scientists in the Netherlands found direct evidence of these types of extra connections.
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If so, then people may see specific colors with particular letters because they have extra connections between the brain areas involved in word and color perception. One thing that may happen in synesthesia, Hubbard says, is that some of these connections don’t get pruned away. His research involves studies of what causes synesthesia. He is a post-doctoral researcher at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research. “During our first few years of life, our brain makes more connections than it needs, and then eventually prunes some of those away,” says Edward Hubbard. This theory draws on the fact that children are born with many nerve connections between nearby parts of the brain. One theory is that synesthesia may be caused by some “cross-wiring” between areas of the brain that process different sensations, such as color, sound or taste. At certain points in the brain, these various senses converge. It’s then sent on to “higher” regions in the cortex for further processing. Information from each of our senses is first processed in its own special region.
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It is the outermost part of the brain that organizes and enables us to respond to incoming messages. Much of this sensory processing occurs in an area of the brain called the cortex. But this much is known: Messages gathered from the eyes, ears, mouth, nose and nerves involved in the sense of touch travel to the brain for processing. Scientists are still trying to discover exactly how information from the senses merge together in the brain. So how can the sound of a musical instrument lead to color? That type of activity didn’t occur in people who experience each sense separately. For synesthetes who perceive colors when hearing words, a certain part of the brain involved with vision is active in response to sound. Studies done in the mid-1990s showed that synesthesia also can be measured by brain-scanning techniques. If the letter “b” is lime green, it will always be lime green. How? Studies show that the colors synesthetes see are highly specific and consistent over time. They are not just figments of an active imagination. Scientists know that in synesthesia, those colors are real.
#Synthesia condition movie
Some synesthetes report that they see such colors internally, in “the mind’s eye.” Others, such as Duffy, see their visions projected in front of them, like watching an image on a movie screen. Synesthetes do not actively think about their perceptions - they just happen. “Until I was 16, I took it for granted that everyone shared those perceptions with me.” This is just part of the way alphabet letters look to me,” says Duffy. “For as long as I could remember, each letter of the alphabet had a different and distinct color. To these people, the “S” figures appear in a different color than the “2” figures. When people with certain types of synesthesia look at the image on the left, they can easily detect the six figures facing the opposite way, as shown in the image on the right.