![]() ![]() "People are different," says Rothen, "and we need to consider those individual differences. That may lead to interesting findings about cognitive function that can be applied to the general population. Now it is basically accepted that synaesthetes perceive the world differently and we are asking how it relates to other cognitive functions," he says. "Ten to 15 years ago, researchers were mostly concerned with showing that synaesthesia was real and not just metaphorical thinking. "The focus previously has been on the synaesthetic experience alone but now there is interest in asking if more is going on beyond the synaesthesia."ĭr Nicolas Rothen, who is carrying out research into synaesthesia and memory at the University of Sussex, agrees attitudes towards synaesthesia have changed. How much of your cognitive profile, what you're good at and what you're not good at, is affected by synaesthesia? We are looking for benefits and deficits as well as whether we can use multisensory effects to help learning in the average child," she says.ĭr Michael Banissy, senior lecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, agrees that understanding how the condition develops in children will be a focus of future research and key to a broader comprehension of synaesthesia. "One of the streams of the latest research is to look at how synaesthesia affects development in a child. Now it's shifted away from the burden of proof and we are free to explore the questions scientists really want to ask," Simner says, noting that advances in brain imaging had provided better evidence of the existence of synaesthesia. "Before when I gave talks about synaesthesia, 96% of the audience would not believe it and the others – the synaesthetes – would think it was just obvious. ![]() Her team has recently been awarded a €1.3m grant by the European Research Council to develop the first test to identify the condition in children.Īnd, in parallel, Simner and her team are working with researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands on a study to try to identify the genes implicated in synaesthesia, which often runs in families. "There's definitely been a shift in the time I've been a synaesthesia researcher," says Dr Julia Simner, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia, who runs the synaesthesia and sensory integration laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. ![]() While scientists have known about synaesthesia for 200 years, only recently have researchers – across the fields of psychology, neuroscience and psycholinguistics – been able to focus their attentions on what effect the condition has on synaesthetes' broader cognitive function and, crucially, what synaesthesia may be able to do for the non-synaesthete population. But among the wider population it has remained a mysterious condition, although it is known to affect at least 4.4% of adults across its many forms.įor instance, a grapheme-colour synaesthete might "see" the days of the week, letters and numbers as particular colours a lexical-gustatory synaesthete will experience a particular taste in their mouth when they hear a given word and an odour-visual/spatial synaesthete will see shapes, movement and colours when they detect certain smells.
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