Jools Simner (MA 1997) is giving a public lecture at U of T this evening (March 18) on synaesthesia. Jools wrote her MA forum paper on VP anaphora under the supervision of Ron Smyth. She went on to do a Ph.D. at the University of Sussex and is now a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Edinburgh and a leading world expert on synaesthesia.
Tuesday March 18, 7:00 pm
Room 330, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto (80 Queen’s Park Crescent)
Tasty coloured sounds: The experiences of synaesthetes
Jools Simner
Abstract: Synaesthesia is an inherited neurological condition that gives rise to a kind of 'merging of the senses'. For example, synaesthetes might 'see' colours when they hear music, or experience tastes in the mouth when they read words. One particularly common variant is experiencing colours when reading letters or numbers, and this variant of the condition – known as grapheme-colour synaesthesia -- is found in around 1 in 100 people. What are the experiences of synaesthetes, and how do these unusual experiences develop during childhood? How do they impact on schooling and early life development and how do adult synaesthetes navigate their multisensory worlds? I will explore the nature of these cross-sensory experiences and ask what they might also tell us about sensory processing in the population at large. I’ll describe what I have learned from the scientific research carried out at my Synaesthesia and Sensory Integration lab over the last decade, and how synaesthesia might open novel ways of understanding creativity, perception and the very nature of reality.
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