1. Greg Ellard, Jessicka Doheny, Rachel Cuttle, and Sorcha Doyle.

2. Synaesthesia  “A condition in which a sensory experience normally associated with one modality occurs when another modality is stimulated. To a certain extent such cross-modality experiences are perfectly normal; e.g. low-pitched tones give a sensation of softness or fullness while high- pitched tones feel brittle and sharp, the colour blue feels cold while red feels warm.”  “However, the term is usually restricted to the unusual cases in which regular and vivid cross- modality experiences occur.”  In other words.....

3.  Synaesthesia is where peoples senses can get a bit mixed up. It is like an extra sense.  There are at least sixty- one types of synaesthesia; two–sensory and multiple- sensory.

4.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIEiOrxht NQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIEiOrxht NQ

5. Two-Sensory Synaesthesia  This is where two senses cross. It can be undirectional e.g. a word produces a colour, or bi-directional e.g. a word can produce both a colour and a sound. Such as where:  A smell produces the perception of a colour -> Coloured-Olfaction  A taste produces the perception of colour -> Coloured-Gustation  A sound produces the perception of colour -> Coloured-Hearing or Chromaesthesia

6. Multiple-Sensory Synaesthesia  The experience of numbers that have their own colours -> Coloured-Numbers  The experience of letters as colours -> Coloured-Letters  The experience of colours when the individual hears words -> Coloured-Graphemes  The experience of numbers as shapes -> Shaped-Numbers

7. Coloured-Letters/Numbers

8. Aliens in the Family  Written by Jamie Ward, and published 2008.  “People with synaesthesia experience the ordinary world in extraordinary ways.”  Most synaesthetes don’t realise their condition, just as in the case of Debbie she did not discover she had synaesthesia until her mid-twenties.

9.  Sometimes synaesthesia rules a persons life without them ever realising it; they will often name their children to fit their synaesthesia and choose their partners on this basis.  “The fact that synaesthesia runs in families doesn’t automatically make it genetic.” Although, there is scientific evidence of a genetic link to synaesthesia.

10.  Even though synaesthesia runs in families it doesn’t mean all family members have the same form.  In the case of the identical twins Mary and Jacqueline, they had similar types of synaesthesia but saw different colours.  E.g. Mary sees “a” as green and Jacqueline sees it as red.  Yet again they didn’t realise they had synaesthesia until they were in their early twenties.

11. Today’s Lecture  The most common forms of synaesthesia, and the ones we will be looking at are:  Grapheme -> colour synaesthesia -> multiple- sensory  Chromaesthesia -> coloured hearing -> two- sensory  Coloured Gustation -> Taste as a colour -> two- sensory

12. Grapheme  This is where the individual experiences colour when they hear words.

18. Chromaesthesia  This is where an non visual stimuli evokes the perception of a colour.  Such as seeing colour as you hear music.

20. Coloured Gustation  When some synesthetes eat, the food evokes the perception of colour.

26.  This is one of the tests for synaesthesia we came across:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o39TiACe4mw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o39TiACe4mw

27. Any Questions?

28. References  Ward, J. (2008). The Frog Who Croaked Blue (pp. 1 – 12). East Sussex: Routledge  Reber, A.S., & Reber E.S. (2001). The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (p 732). London: Penguin Books.  Retrieved October 11, 2009, from: http://home.comcast.net/~sean.day/html/types/ htm http://home.comcast.net/~sean.day/html/types/ htm  Booth, S., Texas, S., & Licata, D. Synaesthesia. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from: http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap /UBNRP/synesthesia/types.html http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap /UBNRP/synesthesia/types.html