This article focuses on grapheme- color synesthesia. This is a neurological condition where people see colors when the think about letters numbers or words. If I had grapheme- color synesthesia, I would see, say, the color green whenever I read the word "helicopter". Or maybe I would even see a color that's not read while I'm reading "red."
Scientists at Oxford have been trying to figure out what is differences in synesthetes' brains that allows for this to happen. They reported that people with this condition experience greater activity in the part of the brain that is associated with vision (the visual cortex). They reached this conclusion by running an experiment where they stimulated different subjects' visual cortex and found that people with grapheme-color synesthesia only required a third of the stimulation that other "normal" subjects had- showing that synesthetes have a more active visual cortex. This research on how the cerebral cortex works could be helpful in treating people who experience hallucinations or unordinary perceptions of things.
I found this article interesting because Synesthesia is something that I've been curious about for a while. I was listening to a howstuffworks podcast on this topic while I was on a run once, but I only really caught snippets of it. What I was able to catch was that there are other forms of synesthesia as well, such as people who are able to feel others' pain. I wonder if this also relates to the research that was done for grapheme color synesthesia.
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