Past Event

Dr. Marcus Watson of the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia will be giving a colloquium talk on Thursday, March 6th, at 11:30 a.m., in room 2203 of Dunton Tower. Refreshments will be available before the talk. All are welcome.

Synaesthesia: Learning to perceive, perceiving to learn

Synaesthesia is an unusual trait in which particular experiences are reliably triggered by certain classes of stimuli. For instance, roughly 1% of the population experiences specific colours when viewing or thinking about particular letters or numbers: grapheme-colour synaesthesia. An obvious question is: why? What makes someone experience limited domains of the world in such an unusual way? The predominant theoretical accounts emphasize anomalous neurophysiology as the cause of synaesthesia, specifically anomalous hyper-connectivity between certain brain areas, and this hyper-connectivity is itself theorized to arise from a mutation to a gene that controls neural pruning.

Alternative accounts going back to the late 19th century emphasize experience and learning, suggesting that these play a role at least as great as neurophysiology in the aetiology of synaesthesia. I agree, and argue that any account that is not learning-centric is grossly inadequate to explain the origins of synaesthesia. In support of this claim, I offer a reconsideration of long-standing findings in synaesthesia research, such as the fact that almost all triggers of synaesthetic experience are category structures that are learned, usually in school, over several years and with much difficulty. I also present new results from my own work, such as differences in the prevalence of synaesthesia that appear to stem from differences in second-language acquisition. All this, I suggest, supports a developmental learning hypothesis of synaesthesia: namely that synaesthesia develops, at least in part, because it is useful for childhood learning challenges.