Synaesthesia: when coloured sounds taste sweet.
Synaesthesia is the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal linkage--for example, hearing a tone (the inducing stimulus) evokes an additional sensation of seeing a colour (concurrent perception). Of the different types of synaesthesia, most have colour as the concurrent perception, with concurrent perceptions of smell or taste being rare. Here we describe the case of a musician who experiences different tastes in response to hearing different musical tone intervals, and who makes use of her synaesthetic sensations in the complex task of tone-interval identification. To our knowledge, this combination of inducing stimulus and concurrent perception has not been described before.
Beeli
Gian
G
Institute of Neuropsychology, University of Zurich, 8032 Zürich, Switzerland.
Esslen
Michaela
M
Jäncke
Lutz
L
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D003116:Color; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006309:Hearing / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D009146:Music / Q000523:psychology; D011930:Reaction Time; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013016:Sound; D013649:Taste / Q000502:physiology*