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POPSRare but Real: People Who Feel, Taste and Hear Color "If you ask synesthetes if they'd wish to be rid of it, they almost always say no. For them, it feels like that's what normal experience is like. To have that taken away would make them feel like they were being deprived of one sense." -- Simon Baron-Cohen, synesthesia researcher at the University of Cambridge
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POPSMirror-touch people who feel a touch on their own body when seeing another person being touched
Because of the study's small size -- the researchers tested just ten synesthetes, though in a sense the number is incredible, as only one such case was previously documented -- the findings are primarily important in terms of physiology. Mirror system activity was observed in the lone earlier synesthete, and the current findings back up the association between the feelings and the system: if the same system was responsible for the sensation, it would ostensibly be difficult to distinguish between real and mirror touches. The researchers also noted that mirror synesthetes had higher levels of empathy than a control group in the study, though connecting such findings to a general empathic mechanism requires, at this stage in the research, a leap of faith. But it's probably not too soon to say, as one of the study's authors did, that "This may be an exaggeration of a brain mechanism that we all possess to some degree."
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POPSSynesthetes - people who hear colors, see flavors ... "For people of a poetic bent, this is quite useful: You get to tell your date that her eyes glow like the moon, hair ripples like the ocean and skin is smoother than a friendly corporate takeover. (Fine, I'm not a poet.) But life wasn't always so romantic. The arts are a latter-day human characteristic, one that requires a certain amount of security and stability to flourish. So how did it develop? To help our ancestors climb trees, said Ramachandran. Doing so requires a vision-informed mental map of the branches before us, as well as a touch-informed mental map of our limbs' positions. Somehow these have to correlate. Which is quite a trick, when you think about it."
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POPSAnimal senses humans don't have You might think you're smart, but none of your senses rival the keenest abilities in the animal world. Animals see in the dark, sniff prey miles away, and detect electrical output from muscle twitches in hidden meals. Read on, so you don't become one of those meals.<<
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POPSNeurobiologists Discover Individuals Who 'Hear' Movement "We might find that motion processing centers of the visual cortex are more interconnected with auditory brain regions than previously thought, even in the 'normal' brain," Saenz says. "At this point, very little is known about how the auditory and visual processing systems of the brain work together. Understanding this interaction is important because in normal experience, our senses work together all the time."
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POPSThe Sound of Sight Both groups judged auditory patterns accurately about 85 percent of the time, the researchers report in the August 5 issue of Current Biology. On the visual trials, nonsynesthetes’ judgments fell to nearly chance levels, a result that corroborates other research showing that most people are better at judging auditory patterns than assessing visual patterns. In contrast, synesthetes—who reported hearing sounds such as beeps or taps in time with the visual signals—distinguished matching from nonmatching rhythms 75 percent of the time.
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POPSSynesthsia Mason Williams: "He liked butter, for its color, so he ordered, toast and color..."
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POPSPaintings can be heard as well as seen People are born with synesthesia, which runs in families. Ward and other scientists believe that by studying the phenomenon they can learn more about how the senses and thoughts are linked in the brain. "Kandinsky wanted to make visual art more like music -- more abstract. He also hoped that his paintings would be heard by his audiences," Ward added.
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