Dean's Seminar - Are we all synaesthetes? Rare and common cases of sensory unions
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- Speaker(s):
- Dr Ophelia Deroy, Marie Curie Researcher (FP7), Centre for the Study of the Senses Chair: Professor Barry Smith, Director, Institute of Philosophy
- Event date:
- Tuesday 06 November 2012
School of Advanced Study, University of London
- Description
-
Synaesthesia ('perceiving together' in Ancient Greek) is a condition where people have "a conscious experience of systematically induced sensory attributes that are not experienced by most people under comparable conditions" (Grossenbacher & Lovelace, 2001, p. 36). Certain synaesthetes will for instance report visualising colours when hearing musical notes or seeing black letters on a page. Everyone is however sensitive to surprising unions between the senses, feeling for instance that a high pitch sound is 'brighter' than a lower-pitch one, or that certain shapes or images go better with certain musical attributes. Should we consider, as many researchers have explicitly or implicitly accepted, that these unions represent a weak form of synaesthesia? What does it imply for the study of these two phenomena and the origins of synaesthesia?
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