AI Article Synopsis
- Synesthetes, who make up a small part of the population, experience unique sensory associations, such as linking colors to letters and numbers.
- Recent research in cognitive science suggests that studying synesthesia helps us understand how healthy individuals' brains process subjective experiences, similar to neuropsychological studies.
- The proposed "palimpsest hypothesis" suggests that synesthetes repurpose brain areas originally used for color perception to process written language, with synesthetic colors being remnants of this earlier expertise.
Article Abstract
Synesthetes, a small fraction of the population, experience systematic, additional associations. For example, they may arbitrarily associate a specific color to each letter or number. Synesthesia has offered for the last ten years to cognitive science a unique opportunity to study the neural bases of subjective experience, drawing on individual differences just like in neuropsychology, but with healthy people. Here we review the current knowledge and propose a new theory, the "palimpsest hypothesis", a variant of the recycling hypothesis for reading. The neural development of written language expertise (a recent cultural invention acquired without any genetic modification) requires indeed the recycling of brain regions predisposed to expertise acquisition into reading regions. The palimpsest hypothesis supposes that for synesthetes recycling involves neuronal networks that were already specialized for color perception. Synesthetic colors would be the remains of this former expertise.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/medsci/2012288019 | DOI Listing |
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