Synaesthesia is a rare condition that gives rise to a type of ‘merging of sensations’. In other words, there is a joining together of sensations that are normally experienced separately by most people. For example, for some synaesthetes, hearing words causes taste sensations to flood the mouth (e.g., the word “house” might trigger the taste of toffee). For other synaesthetes, letters, numbers or words feel coloured in some way (e.g., A might be red, Monday might be green). Particularly common synaesthesias include those triggered by linguistic sequences (letters, digits, days, months etc.), and those that trigger colour or shape in some way (e.g., coloured letters, months in space). There are likely to be well over 100 different types of synaesthesia depending on the sensations involved. The MULTISENSE project is a 4 year ERC funded project investigating some fundamental questions about synaesthesia: how and when it develops, how it may change across the lifespan and how synaesthestes may differ from non-synaesthetes . The project is developing a new assessment tool to identify child synaesthetes, and will evaluate multisensory processing (how different sensory information, e.g. sight and sound is processed simultaneously) in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes across the lifespan, considering changes that occur throughout childhood, non-elderly adulthood, and older age. The project also looks at how the human brain comes to develop this complex ability, and how certain genetically ‘pre-marked’ brains come to experience multisensory integration in remarkable ways. Funding comes from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no GA 617678.
