Skip Navigation


Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on June 14, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(2):379-385; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm072
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrowOA All Versions of this Article:
18/2/379    most recent
bhm072v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (8)
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Beeli, G.
Right arrow Articles by Jäncke, L.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Beeli, G.
Right arrow Articles by Jäncke, L.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 2007 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Time Course of Neural Activity Correlated with Colored-Hearing Synesthesia

Gian Beeli, Michaela Esslen and Lutz Jäncke

Institute of Psychology, Department of Neuropsychology, University of Zürich 8032, Switzerland

Address correspondence to Lutz Jäncke, Institute of Psychology, Department of Neuropsychology, University of Zurich, Binzmühlestrasse 14, Box 25, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland. Email: l.jaencke{at}psychologie.unizh.ch.

Synesthesia is defined as the involuntary and automatic perception of a stimulus in 2 or more sensory modalities (i.e., cross-modal linkage). Colored-hearing synesthetes experience colors when hearing tones or spoken utterances. Based on event-related potentials we employed electric brain tomography with high temporal resolution in colored-hearing synesthetes and nonsynesthetic controls during auditory verbal stimulation. The auditory-evoked potentials to words and letters were different between synesthetes and controls at the N1 and P2 components, showing longer latencies and lower amplitudes in synesthetes. The intracerebral sources of these components were estimated with low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography and revealed stronger activation in synesthetes in left posterior inferior temporal regions, within the color area in the fusiform gyrus (V4), and in orbitofrontal brain regions (ventromedial and lateral). The differences occurred as early as 122 ms after stimulus onset. Our findings replicate and extend earlier reports with functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography in colored-hearing synesthesia and contribute new information on the time course in synesthesia demonstrating the fast and possibly automatic processing of this unusual and remarkable phenomenon.

Key Words: colored-hearing • colored-perception • cross-modal • EEG • LORETA • synesthesia

Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by University of Zurich.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 BrainHome page
P. H. Weiss and G. R. Fink
Grapheme-colour synaesthetes show increased grey matter volumes of parietal and fusiform cortex
Brain, January 1, 2009; 132(1): 65 - 70.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.