Neuroscientists found sensory corrections spills Synesthesia read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/882-neuroscientists-found-sensory-corrections-spills-synesthesia

Neuroscientists at Emory University have found that people who experience a mixing of the senses, known as synesthesia.

Synesthesia is a stable trait, and estimated to be present in 1 to 4 percent of people. One of the most common forms of synesthesia is when people involuntarily see particular colors in connection with letters, numbers or sounds.

Children with synesthesia say sometimes distracting when they are trying to read. Thus, understanding the origins of synesthesia may help people with dyslexia or other learning differences, or people who have lost their sight or hearing and are trying to engage in sensory substitution for rehabilitation.

Research team led by neurologist Krish Sathian enrolled 17 people with synesthesia, and asked them to take a form of the IAT (implicit association test) Known to use probing social attitudes, and also assess "cross-modal correspondences."

An explaining of a cross model correspondence, Sathian and his colleagues found that, people with synesthesia were more sensitive to correspondences between the sounds of pseudo words. Such correspondences are called "sound-symbolic," and may be relevant to the evolutionary origins of language.

People with synesthesia were not significantly more sensitive to purely sensory associations between the pitch of a sound and the size or position of a shape, compared to non-synesthetes.

In this situation, sensitivity on the IAT, means that study participants would have a greater difference in response times to congruent pairings of shape and sound in comparison to incongruent pairings.

Participants screened with an online test called the Synesthesia Battery. This test confirms whether people who report they have synesthesia have consistent associations.

A connection between letters or other symbols and colors, also known as "grapheme-color" synesthesia, was the most common type in the Emory study. It represents the presence of idiosyncratic wrinkles in which how people learned their letters or other symbols during childhood.

To be sure, people with synesthesia are not all the same. Some describe experiencing connections between shapes and tastes, or porous boundaries between self and non-self.