title: The neural correlates of coloured music: a functional MRI investigation of auditory-visual synaesthesia.
abstract: In auditory-visual synaesthesia, all kinds of sound can induce additional visual experiences. To identify the brain regions mainly involved in this form of synaesthesia, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used during non-linguistic sound perception (chords and pure tones) in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes. Synaesthetes showed increased activation in the left inferior parietal cortex (IPC), an area involved in multimodal integration, feature binding and attention guidance. No significant group-differences could be detected in area V4, which is known to be related to colour vision and form processing. The results support the idea of the parietal cortex acting as sensory nexus area in auditory-visual synaesthesia, and as a common neural correlate for different types of synaesthesia.
authors.affiliation: Hannover Medical School, Clinic for Psychiatry, Social Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Germany. neufeld.janina@mh-hannover.de
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Neufeld
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sinke
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Dillo
authors.forename: H M
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Emrich
authors.forename: G R
authors.initials: GR
authors.lastname: Szycik
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Dima
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bleich
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zedler
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009146:Music / Q000523:psychology*; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*