( People with a form of synesthesia in wh...)New insight into people who 'see' colors in letters and numbers

People with a form of synesthesia in which they see colors when viewing letters and numbers really do see colors, researchers, led by Edward M. Hubbard of the University of California San Diego, have found. What's more, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of their brains reveals that they show activation of color-perception areas.

The researchers said their findings lend support to the hypothesis that the condition is due to cross-activation between adjacent brain areas involved in perceiving shapes and colors. Some synesthetes report seeing colors when listening to music, or feeling tactile shapes while tasting food. This cross-activation might develop, they theorize, by a failure of the "pruning" of neural connections between the areas in the developing brain.

The rare condition called synesthesia--in which people's sensory perceptual circuitry seems to be miswired--was long dismissed as an oddity not worthy of scientific study. Now, however, researchers such as Hubbard and his colleagues are using the condition to gain insights into the neural basis of perception.

In their experiments with synesthetes who report seeing colors when they view numbers or letters, the researchers first sought to determine whether synesthetes really see the colors.

In one such experiment, they presented six synesthetes with patterns of black letters or numbers--known as "graphemes"--on a white background. They chose those graphemes that the synesthetes reported elicited specific colors. They designed the experiment so that if the synesthetes really were seeing the colors, that color perception would help them distinguish shapes such as triangles or squares formed by the graphemes. In another experiment, the researchers found that synesthetic color helped the synesthetes pick out specific numbers or letters in a crowded display.

The researchers found that the synesthetic colors really did help the synesthetes distinguish the shapes or gra
'"/>

Source:Cell Press

Page: 1 2
Related biology news :

1. Alaskan puzzles, monitoring provide insight about North Pacific salmon runs
2. New insight into regulation of blood stem cells
3. New insight into autoimmune disease: Bacterial infections promote recognition of self-glycolipids
4. New insights into how Huntingtons disease attacks the brain
5. Gambling monkeys give insight into neural machinery of risk
6. Structures of marine toxins provide insight into their effectiveness as cancer drugs
7. Flies on speed offer insight into the roles of dopamine in sleep and arousal
8. Grasshopper love songs give insight into sensory tuning
9. Studies on human genome variation provide insight into disease
10. Study provides insight into cellular defenses against genetic mutation
11. New insights into the software of life