Decoding the genetics of synaesthesia -
Join the study!
Do you associate letters, numbers, days of the week, or months of the year with colours?
If so, we would like to invite you to participate in our study.
Anina Rich lecture FINAL
The Macquarie University Community
Hi Everyone,
I would like to bring your attention to the 'Decoding the genetics of synaesthesia' study which is carried out by researchers in Netherlands. Importantly, this is an online study and you do not need to travel should you decide to participate.
Please find information about the project below and contact the researchers directly if you have any questions or would like to sign up for the study.
Cheers,
Marina
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen is conducting a large scale study into the genetics of synaesthesia. We are looking for individual synaesthetes to participate as well as families with several synaesthetes. Participants can be located anywhere worldwide - you do not need to travel to participate since all parts of the study can be done online and through the mail. We would like to invite you to take part in the study by clicking on the following address:
On the website you will find information about the study and on how to register. For more information you can also email us at synaesthesia@mpi.nl
Please help us spread the word; pass this message on to family and friends!
NEWS FROM THE LAB.
Dear Synesthesia study Participant,
It has been just over a year since we have started with the synaesthesia project, and we have faced many exciting challenges with the project. Although we are still actively seeking participants, over 400 synaesthetes have shared their DNA with us! Thanks so much for your participation - we have made some great progress.
We would also like to announce the release of our new synaesthesia app called SynQuiz! In collaboration with the Language in Interaction consortium (https://www.languageininteraction.nl/) at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, we have developed an app that allows you to take the synaesthesia test right on your mobile device! Participants can register their results to participate in our study if they wish. If you are receiving this email, you have registered for our study but have not fully participated. If you are still interested in participating you can do so by downloading the app, completing the “full test” and then registering your results. This might be an easier way of completing the battery if you ran into technical problems the first time around. Even if you have no wish to participate further you can still download the app and amaze your friends with your unique abilities! You can download the app here (please note that the app may not work with older devices):
iTunes
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/synquiz/id960687121
Google Play
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.ru.languageininteraction.synquiz
You can also read about the app on the language in Interaction website! (https://www.languageininteraction.nl/synquiz.html)
In other news we also just finished up with a very successful colloquium and masterclass on synaesthesia called decoding the Neurobiology of Synaesthesia. This event was funded by the koninklijke nederlandse akademie van wetenschappen (KNAW) and included researchers in neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and genetics from around the world. The participating researchers discussed what is known about synaesthesia and what scientific questions can be answered by studying it. Check out the link to the conference to see other researchers who are also investigating the various aspects of synaesthesia. http://knaw.nl/en/news/calendar/decoding-the-neurobiology-of-synaesthesia
Thanks again for your interest and participation in our project. Project updates will be posted at the following website as they become available:
You can continue to help us out by passing along the link to our study to your family and friends (www.mpi.nl/synaesthesia).
Kindest regards,
The Decoding the Genetics of Synaesthesia team
Terri Timely's short film, Synesthesia.
Synaesthesia: Which color is A? Part II
Synaesthesia is a condition where one sense elicit others. Part II is about the neurological and scientific aspects.
http://www.synaesthesia.com
or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Synaes...
Derek Tastes of Earwax
Perhaps one in every hundred people experiences a blending of the senses.
Questions and answers about synaesthesia
Programme transcript
Imagine if every time you saw someone called Derek you got a strong taste of earwax in your mouth. It happens to James Wannerton, who runs a pub. Derek is one of his regulars. Another regular's name gives him the taste of wet nappies. For some puzzling reason, James's sense of sound and taste are intermingled.
Dorothy Latham sees words as colours. Whenever she reads a black and white text, she sees each letter tinged in the shade of her own multi-coloured alphabet - even though she knows the reality of the text is black and white. Spoken words have an even stranger effect. She sees them, spelled out letter by letter, on a colourful tickertape in front of her head.
Both James and Dorothy have a mysterious condition called synaesthesia, in which their senses have become linked. For years scientists dismissed it, putting it in the same category as séances and spoon-bending. But now, synaesthesia is sparking a revolution in our understanding of the human mind.
The synaesthete in all of us
Two synaesthetes seldom agree on the colours or tastes they experience. While Covent Garden may taste of crinkly chocolate to James, it's very unlikely to have the same taste for another synaesthete. And Dorothy's brother Peter, also a synaesthete, won't see M or Z in the same colour as she does. But despite these differences, scientists are now beginning to discover more and more overarching synaesthetic patterns.
Dorothy doesn't only see letters and numbers in colour. Music produces a riot of colour, too. As Dorothy hears notes going from low to high, her colours change from black and purple to mid-browns and then yellows and whites. Overall, lower notes evoke darker colours and higher notes brighter colours - and this pattern is true for most synaesthetes.
But surprisingly, when non-synaesthetes are asked to match colours and music, they show a similar pattern. Most of us seem to associate low notes with darker colours and high notes with brighter colours.
The evidence of the synaesthete in all of us doesn't end here. Another clue comes from the way we manipulate numbers. More than half of all synaesthetes who see coloured numbers also experience their numbers arranged in space around them. Heather Birt is such a synaesthete, and she's followed by a stream of numbers wherever she goes.
Recently, scientists started to investigate how non-synaesthetes deal with numbers. They found they're better at manipulating small numbers with their left hand, and their bigger numbers with our right hand. This suggests that we all somehow think of numbers as arranged in space, even if we're not aware of it. More evidence, it seems, that we're all synaesthetic to some degree. It's just that some people experience a more exaggerated version.
Making sense of the world
A few scientists believe that synaesthesia might even explain how we evolved two of the traits that define our species and have transformed our world - creativity and language.
Many famous artists have been synaesthetes - the jazz legend Miles Davis, for instance, and the painter Kandinsky. In fact, a number of studies suggest that synaesthesia may be more common among artists, poets and musicians. This has led some scientists to argue that synaesthesia and creativity may share a similar basis - that both may be down to brain processes that involve linking two seemingly unrelated areas.
Some believe that our common synaesthetic abilities may also have been the springboard to language. Connections between our senses of hearing and vision, for example, could have been an important initial step towards the creation of words. Our earliest ancestors may have first started to talk by using sounds that actually evoked the object they wished to describe. According to this theory, language could have emerged from the multitude of synaesthetic connections within our brains.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/derek_prog_summary.shtml
Synaesthesia
Created May 25, 2001 | Updated Apr 12, 2006
15 Conversations
Synaesthesia is when something experienced with one sense is spontaneously associated with a different sense. It can also be applied to a sensory reaction to an otherwise abstract concept. For instance, some people 'see' music in terms of colours and shapes. Others have a strong sense of colour and shape attached to single numbers or letters of the alphabet. For synaesthetes, this is not simply the application of a metaphor or the result of a fertile imagination, but a genuine and powerful involuntary experience.
The word 'synaesthesia' comes from the Greek syn (joining) and aisthesis (sensation). Examples of possible synaesthesia can be found in works of literature dating back to classical times. The phenomenon has been discussed by the scientific community for some three centuries, and although there are still psychologists who believe that synaesthesia does not exist as a spontaneous experience, others are recognising proof that synaesthesia is an inbuilt neurological condition.
As many as one in 2,000 people experience natural synaesthesia, and there are many different forms, linking different senses or perceptions. Thus a synaesthete may associate texture with taste, smell with colour, and so on. Some forms of synaesthesia are more common; around one in 5,000 associate colours with letters, as few as one in 15,000 will, for instance, associate taste and touch. A small minority of synaesthetes experience multiple synaesthesia, providing them with an almost overwhelming sensory 'identity' for different objects or concepts. The synaesthetic experience is in addition to the normal sensory stimulus, for instance, a person who experiences 'red' when a trumpet is played will hear the trumpet as well. They may actually feel that they are seeing a red colour with the eye, or may simply receive a powerful mental image. If a synaesthete associates the colour yellow with the letter 'E', then they may see the colour overlaid on the letter, or experience a flickering effect between the synaesthetic colour and the original text. This may explain why some synaesthetes develop a dislike of coloured text, for instance on the Internet.
Some Possible Explanations
Sceptics in the psychology and neurology world believe that synaesthesia is a simply an extreme form of association, and has no natural basis. They believe that, for instance, a colour to letter association may be 'imprinted' upon a child by using lettered building blocks of a certain colour or by reading and re-reading an ABC book (A = apple = red/green etc). However, when neurologists carried out brain scans on colour synaesthetes, they discovered increased blood flow in those sections of the brain dealing with the perception of colour - a phenomenon not present in non-colour synaesthetes. This implies that synaesthesia has a genuine neurological basis and that perhaps there are additional links between perception areas in the brains of those with synaesthesia. Another implication that synaesthesia is neurological in origin can be seen in that many non-synaesthetes will experience synaesthetic effect as a result of neurological change, due to migraine, epilepsy, brain injury or the effects of certain (especially hallucinogenic) drugs.
Testing for Synaesthesia
How do you know if what you have is synaesthesia, or just a powerful imagination? Genuine synaesthesia is spontaneous, specific, consistent and durable. In tests, blindfolded subjects have been asked to give colour associations for letters, numbers and words. Tested again, hours, days and even months later, colour synaesthetes give a perfect repetition of original associations, while control subjects are around 85% inconsistent. In addition, synaesthetes tend to give scrupulously detailed descriptions of colours, rather than the basic primary and secondary colour names.
Using Synaesthesia
One of the crucial effects of synaesthesia is that it improves memory and recall. The synaesthetic experience gives additional associations for names, numbers and sounds, which can provide a vivid link to the information, and the more forms of synaesthesia a person experiences, the better their memory is likely to be. Many memory improving techniques recommended in self-help books use artificial synaesthesia, encouraging the student to form vivid sensory associations with the information they wish to remember. For the genuine synaesthete, such techniques can simply form an encumbrance.
Although synaesthesia does not seem to be linked directly to artistic ability, synaesthetic tendencies have been claimed for Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Messiaen, Kandinsky, Hockney, Eisenstein and Baudelaire. Vladimir Nabokov was certainly a synaesthete, for he writes vividly of his childhood explanation of the phenomenon is his autobiography.
Living with Synaesthesia - One Researcher's Perspective
I strongly associate letters, words and numbers with colour, shape and texture. For me the effective is cumulative; that is to say that the combination and juxtaposition of colours and shapes for different numbers or letters can give each sequence a unique 'signature'. Like most synaesthetes, I have experienced these sensations as long as I can remember, and they seem perfectly natural to me: I also assumed that everybody perceived the world in this way! When I discovered that others did not know what I meant by a 'pink-sounding word' I just thought it was another bit of personal weirdness, until I heard about synaesthesia.
I have always used it - whether I wished to or not - to remember dates, phone numbers, car registrations and so on. I coasted through school and university by simply remembering a framework of dates and formulae, and for English literature, I learnt all 300 lines of one set piece of poetry!
The associations can be bizarre, but they are very vivid. I sometimes find it infuriating, as I cannot always work out why a particular association is made. I recently received a new security code for my credit card, and immediately thought: 'That number is just like having a pebble in your mouth' - why???
I'm also a migraine sufferer, and a strongly visual person. I don't understand the complex neurology, but I feel sure that all these factors link together, and go towards making me who I am.
http://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A558371
This video was made using Blender (http://blender.org). The MIDI file used to make the Blender model is by Bernd Krueger (http://www.piano-midi.de/midi_files.htm).
Seeing Sound, Tasting Color: Synesthesia
Published on Jul 29, 2012
"There are many different forms," says David Eagleman, a neuroscientist known for his ability to garner important insights into the nature of perception and consciousness through idiosyncratic methods. "Essentially, any cross-blending of the senses that you can think of, my colleagues and I have found a case somewhere."
Bianca Nogrady
ABC
Friday, 17 July 2015
Does the sound of a human scream make your hair stand on end? Now scientists say they can explain why.
They've found the sound of human screaming is acoustically designed to plug directly into your brain's fear and alarm circuit.
A study, published today in Current Biology , shows the acoustic characteristic of 'roughness' in screams triggers a response in the amygdala, and the 'rougher' a scream, the greater the fear response.
Lead author Dr Luc Arnal began investigating screams after a colleague confessed that his newborn baby's screams were "hijacking his brain", which got Arnal wondering what made screams so efficient as an alarm signal.
He asked his colleagues to record themselves speaking a normal sentence and then screaming as loud as possible.
"I took my colleagues because I didn't want to have professional screamers, I just wanted people to produce whatever they could produce to have an idea of the variety of sounds that you can find," says Arnal, a post-doctoral fellow in neuroscience at the University of Geneva.
Acoustic analysis of the screams showed they occupy a part of the acoustic spectrum that corresponds to a characteristic known as 'roughness', with high frequency fluctuations in the 30 to 150 Hz range.
"An analogy is the stroboscope in vision -- these flashing lights that flash super-fast -- we could call screams like strobophones, the idea is that it flashes the auditory information very fast," Arnal says.
The researchers then asked volunteers to rate how frightening the different screams were, and found that the more 'roughness' there was in a scream, the more the volunteers were scared by it.
They also looked at how the screams affected brain activity, so volunteers were scanned using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine while listening to the screams.
"The interesting thing is that we found that the amygdala was selectively sensitive to roughness, so the more roughness there was in the signal, the more the amygdala responded."
Researchers also found that numerous kinds of artificial alarm signals feature high levels of roughness, even though there has been very little scientific study done on roughness and its effects, suggesting that alarms succeed in alarming people more by accident than design.
"There's almost nothing in the literature that says that you should use these frequencies to make an alarm signal alarming," Arnal says.
Sounds of survival
Arnal says screams have been neglected as an area of study but are biologically very relevant.
"First, screams are important for our survival so if there's a danger in a new environment, in screams we either ask for help or to inform people around that there is a life-threatening situation," he says.
Screams are also innate -- they are the first vocal signal that newborns produce, suggesting they are a primitive mode of vocal communication.
"It suggests that the scream may constitute an ancestor of vocal communication."
The fact that screams trigger a reaction in the brain's fear centre suggests that the scream itself has evolved to match the brain's structure.
"Usually people think about how the brain responds to sounds but they are interested in the structure, but here we are interested in how sounds fits to the structure," says Arnal.
He now hopes to expand his study to include other animals such as mammals and birds, to see if the feature of roughness is specifically tailored to particular species or whether it is a common feature of screams across the animal kingdom.
'Musicians' brain waves dance to the beat, study finds ABC Science By Bianca Nogrady Posted 27 Oct 2015, 7:18am
Photo: Musicians' brains are better at synchronising to rhythm than non-musicians, according to a study. (blackjake/Getty Images)
Musicians get more out of music because their brain waves are better able to synchronise with musical rhythms, researchers have found.Cortical oscillations — the rhythmic firing of neurons in the brain — are fundamental to our ability to hear and process sounds.Aligning the frequency of these cortical oscillations with the frequency of the sounds we wish to focus on allows us to better tune into these sounds; for example, being able to listen to one person in a room full of people talking.
New York University researchers have discovered the same kind of synchronisation happens when we listen to music, and the better we are at synchronising our brain waves with the music, the better we process the music."We've done a lot of research previously on speech perception and we've shown that these neural oscillations do track to speech, largely following the syllabic rate, which is about 4-5Hz," lead author and PhD candidate Keith Doelling said. I wanted to see if the musical rhythms actually relate to the rhythms in the brain. Mr Keith Doelling "There's a lot of debate that goes on as to how much how much of the relationship there is between music and speech, and do they follow the same sort of pathways."
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Mr Doelling and Professor David Poeppel mapped neuronal activity in the brains of 27 non-musicians and 12 musicians as they listened to three clips of classical music multiple times.
They found that the cortical oscillations of both musicians and non-musicians synchronised with the tempo of the different pieces of music, but musicians were better at tracking very slow beats; less than one beat per second."Maybe non-musicians are having a harder time grouping the notes, so if you hear a note that just once every two seconds you might not really make it into a melody, you might just see it as individual notes,"
Mr Doelling said.
While the musical clips were from music by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, the musicians who participated in the study came from a wide range of musical backgrounds."The more musicians had been training, the longer they had been training, the more they were able to synchronise," he said.Synchronisation affects how listeners process music
The study also showed that the degree of synchronisation affected how well listeners processed the content of the music itself.The researchers tested this by including a slight pitch distortion at one point in the musical segment, and asking listeners firstly if they heard the distortion and secondly, if the pitch went up or down during the distortion. You may also like ...Old or new? Violinists can't tellMusic thrills trigger reward chemical They showed that participants whose cortical oscillations were better synchronised with the music were also better able to pick the pitch distortion.Mr Doelling's interest in the brain's ability to process music stems from his own experiences as a musician."There's a lot of organisation and structure that comes from the rhythm, that brings musicians together and allows them to play all together," he said."I wanted to see if the musical rhythms actually relate to the rhythms in the brain."The team is now hoping to look at whether repeatedly listening to the same piece over and over again can train the brain to better synchronise with musical rhythms."So we're looking to see if the non-musicians get up to the level of the musicians by the end of it," Mr Doelling said.