The Frog Who Croaked Blue; Aliens in the Family

1. Greg Ellard,Jessicka Doheny,Rachel Cuttle, andSorcha Doyle. The Frog Who Croaked Blue; Aliens in the Family

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=aIEiOrxhtNQ

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 synaesthetesdon’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

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 • Booth, S., Texas, S., & Licata, D. Synaesthesia. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from: http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/UBNRP/synesthesia/types.html