{"id":491,"date":"2012-01-18T22:40:19","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T06:40:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/?p=491"},"modified":"2012-01-30T22:47:56","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T06:47:56","slug":"can-you-teach-yourself-synaesthesia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/can-you-teach-yourself-synaesthesia\/","title":{"rendered":"Can you teach yourself synaesthesia?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Neuroscientist Olympia Colizoli<\/a> has done an interesting experiment where she tried inducing synaesthesia in non-synaesthetes:<\/p>\n

To test the idea, they gave seven volunteers a novel to read in which certain letters were always written in red, green, blue or orange (see picture). Before and after reading the book, the volunteers took a “synaesthetic crowding” test, in which they identified the middle letter of a grid of black letters which were quickly flashed onto a screen. Synaesthetes perform better on the test when a letter they experience in colour is the target letter.<\/i><\/p>\n

The volunteers performed significantly better on this test after training compared with people who read the novel in black and white.<\/i><\/p>\n

I’m curious as to how significant the effect turned out to be for non-synaesthetes. (I also wonder: what was the novel? Something by Nabokov maybe? ;-) Unfortunately I can’t find Colizoli’s data on line anywhere, as her research appears to have been presented as a conference poster session rather than a full publication. But hopefully we’ll be hearing more about this in the near future…<\/p>\n

Update<\/b>: You can read a more detailed abstract of Colizoli’s experiment over at synesthesia.info<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neuroscientist Olympia Colizoli has done an interesting experiment where she tried inducing synaesthesia in non-synaesthetes: To test the idea, they gave seven volunteers a novel to read in which certain letters were always written in red, green, blue or orange (see picture). Before and after reading the book, the volunteers took a “synaesthetic crowding” test, … Continue reading Can you teach yourself synaesthesia?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[82],"class_list":["post-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-synesthesia","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":504,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions\/504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}