Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Are we all synaesthetes? Rare and common cases of sensory unions
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Are we all synaesthetes? Rare and common cases of sensory unions
Dean's Seminar
Dean's Seminar - Are we all synaesthetes? Rare and common cases of sensory unions
Speakers:Dr Ophelia Deroy, Marie Curie Researcher (FP7), Centre for the Study of the Senses
Chair: Professor Barry Smith, Director, Institute of Philosophy
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?
View all episodes
Dean's Seminar
Dean's Seminar - Are we all synaesthetes? Rare and common cases of sensory unions
Speakers:Dr Ophelia Deroy, Marie Curie Researcher (FP7), Centre for the Study of the Senses
Chair: Professor Barry Smith, Director, Institute of Philosophy
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?