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Synesthesia can be taught

06.12.2014

Synesthesia is one of the most unusual neuropsychiatric phenomena, when the type of stimulus and the type of sensations that a person experiences do not match. That is, the stimulus refers to one sense organs, and sensations to others. So, colorographic synesthesia means that a person sees or feels an image of letters or numbers in color. Musical-color - if music is perceived in the form of naturally and involuntarily manifested color spots, stripes, waves.

Its mechanism is not entirely clear. For example, a few years ago, neuroscientists from Oxford (Great Britain) suggested that special hyperexcitable neurons, which have a lower excitation threshold and which can establish contacts with neurons from different sensory analyzers, are to blame for synesthetic sensations. These are the neurons that literally care about everything, transfer stimuli to other people's analyzers. On the other hand, it is known that associations between color and symbol in colorographic synesthesia are constant over time and are repeated in different people, which suggests that these associations could be formed under the influence of childhood impressions. It would be logical to assume that synesthetes owe their peculiarity to their own genes that control the development of the brain and nerve chains in it; as for specific associations, they can just grow from personal experience.

However, the results of psychologists from the University of Sussex (UK) suggest that synesthesia can be taught even to those who have never had it. Daniel Bor (Daniel Bor) and his colleagues taught several adults on a special program designed to "associate" letters with one color or another; a total of thirteen such associations were supposed. That is, looking at some letter, the participant of the experiment, in the end, had to come to mind its color. But it should not have been just an association "from the mind", a person really had to feel the letter in color, even if it was depicted in black and white. (We emphasize that we are not talking about hallucinations, that is, the person is aware that in fact the letter is black and white.)

In an article in Scientific Reports, the authors write that it was all the same: volunteers trained in colorographic synesthesia began to feel the colored nature of letters, not only in the laboratory, but also in everyday life. (It also happened that the letters took on personal characteristics, that is, for example, "X" became boring, "W" - calm, etc.) In addition, psychologists noted a curious side effect: those trained in synesthesia increased IQ, approximately by 12 points.

Recall that the participants in the experiment before him did not show any synesthetic abilities. Of course, this does not mean that synesthesia does not depend on genes in any way, but the influence of genetic and environmental factors in this case is more complicated than one might think. For example, genes can only create prerequisites for synesthetic abilities, but they will be in an implicit, dormant form until the environment awakens them, pulls them out. Experiments like this should help us learn more not only about synesthesia itself, but also about the general mechanisms of perception, psychological and neurophysiological.

As for the "curious side effect" associated with an increase in IQ, then perhaps it's all about the expansion of the range of associations that happened after the training. However, whether this was precisely because of the awakened synesthetic abilities, or whether the reason for this was the mental effort itself that the volunteers had to make during the experiment, the researchers have yet to find out.

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