Our Patron, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, writes:
Synaesthesia has enjoyed a startling renaissance in the last two
decades, and it has been a pleasure for me personally to witness this. As
any scholar of this field will know, synaesthesia was a common topic of
research at the end of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th
century for psychologists and others. Quite why it dwindled from being a
phenomenon of considerable scientific interest to one that was virtually
lost from science from the 1940s to the 1980s is unclear, and woud make a
good question for a historian to delve into. Some have speculated that this
was due to the rise of behaviourism, which famously banished subjective
self-reporting of mental experience from psychology during these decades.
But then why did synaesthesia disappear from science whilst schizophrenia
(the symptoms for which are equally dependent on subjective self-report of
mental experience) did not?
Whatever the reasons, my colleague Maria Wyke and I were privileged to have
the opportunity to test a wonderful painter with synaesthesia, and whose
case (E.P) we described in a publication in the journal Perception, in
1987. We felt the least we could do was to either confer some well-deserved
respectability to synaesthesia by proving it was real (through a test of
genuineness) or seal its fate by banishing it once and for ever more from
science, relegating it to a colourful but otherwise unstable, untestable
phenomenon. We were more than a little shocked and pleased when the results
from this single case amply demonstrated that synaesthesia was real. EP's
reports remained highly stable over the period of a year, without any prior
warning that she was going to be retested.
As a result of this 'objective' test of synaesthesia (which is really just
a test of its consistency over time), other researchers have picked up the
phenomenon, which is very heartening. Much of the neuroscience community
were won over to recognize the importance of synaesthesia once my
colleagues and I (Eraldo Paulesu, Chris Frith, and others) had published an
fMRI study. This showed that despite being blindfolded, synaesthetes
showed 'visual activity' in the brain when listening to sounds. What
clearer validation of their subjective self report did one need? Jeffrey
Gray and colleagues in London have recently provided even clearer evidence
for this through neuroimaging, in the Journal Nature Neuroscience. How far
synaesthesia has come, from being a pariah of science, to being published
in Nature.
Julian Asher and I however are currently focused on the ultimate test of
its genuineness: finding a gene for synaesthesia. We hope that you, like
us, find this topic important, fascinating, and worthy of further research.
I wish the Association every success in its aims, and feel it as a great
honour to be its Patron.
Simon Baron-Cohen |
