New research by Goucher College professor of psychology Carol Mills is helping to unravel the layers of mystery surrounding synesthesia – a rare and fascinating phenomenon that causes a person to literally “see” different colors to accompany numbers and letters of the alphabet.
The results of several recent experiments, the latest of which will be published in an upcoming edition of Perception, reveal new methods of understanding this bizarre and colorful joining of sensations that causes information presented to one of the senses to be simultaneously experienced by another sense. These recent studies differ from their predecessors in that they don’t merely catalogue what a synesthete is experiencing, but objectively measure the impact the phenomenon has on the cognitive process, perhaps also revealing universal truths about the way the brain processes information.
Derived from the same root as the term “anesthesia” (the absence of sensation), “synesthesia” represents the combination of sensations. Although a synesthete’s reaction to ordinary stimulae may be exotic – like hearing an orchestral movement and feeling the sound as a soft breeze on the legs – this is typically classified as a weaker response. The phenomenon is most commonly manifested in strong synesthetes by color photisms, or visions of color, accompanying sounds or written letters and numbers.
Both of Mills’ research subjects – a 22-year-old female college student and a multilingual 45-year-old woman - experienced this most common type of synesthesia. However, the results of various tests, including the Stroop test, which mixes and matches letters and colors and measures the length of time it takes to read each list, showed the following unique results:
· A synesthete’s color photism in response to seeing a written letter is rapid and automatic. When presented with the letter “B,” for example, the subject doesn’t think of the color red, she instantly experiences it.
· Letters or numbers elicit colors, but the opposite is not true. When presented with a block of color, the synesthete is unable to choose the corresponding letter as rapidly as she could read the same letter, uncolored, printed on the page.
· When the color of the letter mismatched the subject’s photism for that letter, the synesthesia interfered with naming the actual color, causing the subject to take extra time naming the appropriate color.
· Although the multi-lingual synesthete didn’t learn her second language, Russian, until high school, she was still able to form a separate set of color photisms for the Cyrillic alphabet.
· Surprisingly, in an unhypothesized result, the multi-lingual subject reported after the testing that in addition to her usual color photisms, she was now experiencing a resonance of the colors from the mismatched sets of the Stroop test as well.
These results differ from prior, subjective research that asked only that synesthetes report their experiences. It suggests that synesthesia is a real, on-going experience that may have more influence on the subject’s cognitive processes than was originally assumed.
Mills received her bachelor’s degree from University of Missouri and her master’s degree and Ph.D. from University of Maryland. She has written numerous articles on topics like language, memory and perception that have been published in the journals Cognitive Neuropsychology, Memory and Cognition and The Journal of Experimental Psychology. Prior to her employment at Goucher, she worked as a research scientist for the American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C. and as a research psychologist at the Army Research Institute. Mills frequently works with undergraduate students while conducting research, and the co-authors of two of her presentations on synesthesia are Goucher alumnae/i and colleagues.
If you would like to interview Carol Mills about her research in synesthesia, please contact Janet Ely, 410-337-6015, jely@goucher.edu.
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Goucher is an independent, coeducational liberal arts and sciences college located just north of Baltimore. With an enrollment of more than 1,700 graduate and undergraduate students, Goucher offers majors in 18 departments and five interdisciplinary areas and has master's degree programs in arts administration, creative non-fiction, education, historic preservation and teaching. For more information about the college, visit the web site at www.goucher.edu. |
