Dr. Simner will present a public lecture on
Tasty coloured sounds: The experiences of synaesthetes
Tuesday March 18, 7:00 pm
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.
On Wednesday March 19 3-6pm
Room 544, OCAD University
Dr Daphne Maurer (McMaster University) will discuss results from the Music Visualization Workshop, held May 31 2013 at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto. Drs Simner and Maurer will also co-host a panel on the impact of synesthesia in education.
Dr. Julia Simner is a neuropsychologist
and leading expert in the field of synesthesia research. She trained at the
Universities of Oxford, Toronto and Sussex, and she currently runs the
Synesthesia and Sensory Integration lab at the University of Edinburgh,
Scotland. Her work focuses on the psychological and neuroscientific bases of
synesthesia, and has been published in the high impact science journals such as
‘Nature’. She is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia and is keenly
interested in facilitating the public’s understanding of science. Her work has
been reported in over 100 media articles worldwide, 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 for the general public has been published in
some of Europe’s leading national newspapers.
