Synesthesia: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience

Synesthesia has implications for every major aspect of cognition: perception, attention, language, memory, emotion, and consciousness. It has recently received a lot of attention in the popular press and motivated a great deal of research and discussion among scientists. The questions generated by these two communities are intriguing: Does the synesthetic phenomenon require awareness and attention? How does a feature that is not present become bound with one that is? Does synesthesia develop or is it hard wired? Should it change our way of thinking about perceptual experience in general? What is its value in understanding perceptual systems as a whole? This volume brings together a distinguished group of investigators from diverse backgrounds, who provide intriguing answers to these questions. Although each approaches synesthesia from a very different perspective, and each investigated synesthesia for very different reasons, the similarities between their work cannot be ignored. The research presented in this volume demonstrates that it is no longer reasonable to ask whether or not synesthesia is real-we must now ask how we can account for it from cognitive, neurobiological, developmental, and evolutionary perspectives. This book will be important reading for any scientist interested in brain and mind, synesthetes themselves, and anyone who might be wondering what all the fuss is about.