synaesthesia

Just in: the 2010 Imagine Science Films Festival's Nature Scientific Merit award, given to "a short film that exemplifies science in narrative filmmaking in a compelling, credible and inspiring manner," is An Eyeful of Sound, a short film about audio-visual synaesthesia by Samantha Moore. Here's the trailer:  An Eyeful of Sound - trailer from Samantha Moore on Vimeo. It's a little hard from that clip to get a sense of what the film is like. But it's great that an organization is finally calling attention to science-themed short films. Bravo, ISFF. Related: The Eyeful of Sound…
SUBJECTIVE experience poses a major problem for neuroscientists and philosophers alike, and the relationship between them and brain function is particularly puzzling. How can I know that my perception of the colour red is the same as yours, when my experience of the colour occupies a private mental world to which nobody else has access? How is the sensory information from an object transformed into an experience that enters conscious awareness? The neural mechanisms involved are like a black box, whose inner workings are a complete mystery.  In synaesthesia, the information entering one…
SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which there is a merging of the senses, so that activity in one sensory modality elicits sensations in another. Although first described by Francis Galton in the 1880s, little was known about this condition until recently. A rennaissance in synaesthesia research began about a decade ago; since then, three previously unrecognized forms of the condition have been described, and hypotheses for how it arises have been put forward. Two new studies now provide some insight into time-space synaesthesia, the least researched of all the forms of this…