About the Book
Synesthesia is an inherited condition that gives rise to a 'merging of the senses'. For those who experience it, everyday activities such as reading or listening to music can trigger extraordinary impressions of colour, taste, and other sensations. Synesthesia research can tell us much about normal sensation because all people experience cross-sensations to an implicit degree (e.g., all people match high pitch sounds to lighter and smaller shapes). Synesthesia has
a considerably broad appeal, and in recent decades the field has experienced a remarkable resurgence of interest. These developments have painted a detailed story about the development, inheritance,
psychology, history, and neuroscience of synesthesia, and provided a contemporary source of study for a new generation of scientists. In addition, the condition has been of great interest to those psychologists and philosophers interested in consciousness. The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia brings together this body of knowledge into one definitive handbook, to provide a broad overview of the field. It includes a large number of concisely written chapters, each tackling
specific research questions of current interest, placed under broader headings that unite these topics into coherent themes (e.g., Origins of Synesthesia; Neurological Basis of Synesthesia).
Table of Contents:
Part 1: Origins of Synesthesia
1: Donielle Johnson, Carrie Allison, and Simon Baron-Cohen: The prevalence of synesthesia: The consistency revolution
2: Julian E. Asher and Duncan A. Carmichael: The genetics and inheritance of synaesthesia
3: Daphne Maurer, Laura C. Gibson, and Ferrinne Spector: Synesthesia in infants and very young children
4: Julia Simner and Edward M. Hubbard: Synesthesia in school-aged children
5: Peter Hancock: Synesthesia, alphabet books, and fridge magnets
Part 2: Synesthesia, Language, and Numbers
6: Roi Cohen Kadosh and Avishai Henik: Numbers, synesthesia, and directionality
7: Clare Jonas and Michelle Jarick: Synesthesia, sequences, and space
8: Julia Simner: The 'rules' of synesthesia
9: Aleksandra Mroczko-Wasowicz and Danko Nikolic: Colored alphabets in bilingual synesthetes
10: Fiona N. Newell: Synesthesia, meaning, and multilingual speakers
11: Wan-Yu Hung: Synesthesia in non-alphabetic languages
12: Monika Sobczak-Edmans and Noam Sagiv: Synesthetic personification: The social world of graphemes
Part 3: Attention and Perception
13: Tessa M. van Leeuwen: Individual differences in synesthesia
14: Anina N. Rich and Jason B. Mattingley: The role of attention in synesthesia
15: Chai-Youn Kim and Randolph Blake: Revisiting the perceptual reality of synesthetic color
16: Bryan D. Alvarez and Lynn C. Robertson: Synesthesia and binding
17: Tanja C. W. Nijboer and Bruno Laeng: Synesthesia, eye-movements, and pupillometry
18: Alicia Callejas and Juan Lupi áñ ez: Synesthesia, incongruence, and emotionality
Part 4: Contemporary and Historical Approaches
19: Jörg Jewanski: Synesthesia in the nineteenth century: Scientific origins
20: Richard E. Cytowic: Synesthesia in the twentieth century: Synesthesia's renaissance
21: Christopher T. Lovelace: Synesthesia in the twenty-first century: Synesthesia's ascent
22: Christine Mohr: Synesthesia in space versus the 'mind's eye': How to ask the right questions
23: Markus Zedler and Marie Rehme: Synesthesia: A psychosocial approach
Part 5: Neurological Basis of Synesthesia
24: Edward M. Hubbard: Synesthesia and functional imaging
25: Romke Rouw: Synesthesia, hyperconnectivity, and diffusion tensor imaging
26: Peter H. Weiss: Can gray matter studies inform theories of (grapheme-color) synesthesia?
27: Kevin J. Mitchell: Synesthesia and cortical connectivity: A neurodevelopmental perspective
28: Lutz Jäncke: The timing of neurophysiological events in synaesthesia
29: Neil G. Muggleton and Elias Tsakanikos: The use of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the investigation of synesthesia
30: Michael J. Banissy: Synesthesia, mirror neurons, and mirror-touch
Part 6: Costs and Benefits: Creativity, Memory, and Imagery
31: Catherine M. Mulvenna: Synesthesia and creativity
32: Cretien van Campen: Synesthesia in the visual arts
33: Patricia Lynne Duffy: Synesthesia in literature
34: Carol Steen and Greta Berman: Synesthesia and the artistic process
35: Beat Meier and Nicolas Rothen: Synesthesia and memory
36: Mary Jane Spiller and Ashok S. Jansari: Synesthesia and savantism
37: Mark C. Price: Synesthesia, imagery, and performance
Part 7: Cross-Modality in the General Population
38: Lawrence E. Marks: Weak synesthesia in perception and language
39: Cesare Parise and Charles Spence: Audiovisual cross-modal correspondences in the general population
40: Argiro Vatakis: Cross-modality in speech processing
41: Vincent E. Walsh: Magnitudes, metaphors, and modalities: A theory of magnitude revisited
42: Laurent Renier and Anne G. De Volder: Sensory substitution devices: Creating 'artificial synesthesias'
43: Christine Cuskley and Simon Kirby: Synesthesia, cross-modality, and language evolution
Part 8: Perspectives on Synesthesia
44: Sean A. Day: Synesthesia: A first-person perspective
45: Noam Sagiv and Chris D. Frith: Synesthesia and consciousness
46: Brian L. Keeley: What exactly is a sense?
47: Mary-Ellen Lynall and Colin Blakemore: What synesthesia isn't
48: V. S. Ramachandran and David Brang: From molecules to metaphor: Outlooks on synesthesia research
49: Jamie Ward: Synesthesia: Where have we been? Where are we going?
About the Author :
Dr. Julia Simner is an experimental neuropsychologist and leading expert in the field of synaesthesia research. She has a background in psychology, languages and linguistics from the Universities of Oxford, Toronto and Sussex, and she runs the Synaesthesia and Sensory Integration lab at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work focusses on the sensory, cognitive, linguistic, developmental, and historical bases of synaesthesia, and has been published in high
impact science journals such as Nature, Trends in Cognitive Science and Brain. She is interested in facilitating the public's understanding of science and her work has been reported in over 100 media
articles world-wide, including the NY Times, BBC, CBC, Telegraph, Times, New Scientist, Scientific American etc. In 2010 she was recognised as an outstanding European scientist by the European Commission's Atomium Culture Initiative and her science writing has been published in some of Europe's leading national newspapers. Dr. Edward M. Hubbard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he directs the Educational
Neuroscience Laboratory. He received degrees from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego and completed his post-doctoral training at INSERM's Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit and Vanderbilt University. He has investigated the
perceptual and neural bases of grapheme-color synesthesia and synesthetic number forms for more than a decade, and his behavioural and neuroimaging work was critical in convincing the scientific community that synaesthesia was a valid, tractable topic for investigation. More recently, he has begun to investigate the neural basis of numerical and mathematical processing in non-synesthetes, and the development of these abilities in children, to better understand the neural mechanisms that lead to
the development of synesthesia in children.
Review :
I cannot praise the book too highly ... It is a matter of regret that its length has made it impossible for me to "read it from cover to cover" before producing a review. But it is with delight that I look forward to having it occupy a place on my bedside table for many weeks to come.
Synesthesia proves that perceptual reality is not one-size-fits-all. For the current state of the science, you won't find a more comprehensive collection of expert voices than the one you're holding now.
An invaluably lucid and comprehensive guide to the multi-coloured world of synaesthesia by two of the leading researchers in the field.
This is a fine reference book for specialists and newcomers to the field.
