The Frog who Croaked Blue: Synesthesia and the Mixing of the Senses (Paperback) Jamie Ward

Everyone will be closely acquainted with a few people who have synesthesia but you may not yet know who they are because, until very recently, it was largely hidden and unknown. Now science is uncovering its secrets and the findings are leading to a radical rethink about how our senses are organized.

"Best book about synaesthesia I have read." MJ

Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia Richard E. Cytowic

The new book of Richard E. Cytowic and David Eagleman.

Synesthesia: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience Noam Sagiv

Owing to its bizarre nature and its implications for understanding how brains work, synesthesia 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 to 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--among them neuroscientists, novelists, and synesthetes themselves--who provide fascinating answers to these questions. Although each approaches synesthesia from a very different perspective, and each was curious about and 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, not to mention synesthetes themselves, and others who might be wondering what all the fuss is about.

Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, Second Edition: A Union of the Senses Richard E. Cytowic

Most people link senses only by way of metaphoric speech, saying, for example, that red is a "warm" color or that a certain cheese tastes "sharp." But a minority of individuals, known as synesthetes, experience the phrase "I see what you're saying" as literally true. In addition to studying the phenomenon for its own sake, neuroscientists are interested in what synesthesia might reveal about consciousness, the working of nonsynesthetic brains, subjective-objective relations, and the relationship between reason and emotion. In this text, Richard Cytowic quickly disposes of earlier criticisms that the phenomenon cannot be "real," demonstrating that it is indeed brain-based. Following a historical introduction, he lays out the phenomenology of synesthesia in detail and gives criteria for clinical diagnosis and an objective "test of genuineness." He reviews theories and experimental procedures to localize the plausible level of the neuraxis at which synesthesia operates. In a discussion of brain development and neural plasticity, he addresses the possible ubiquity of neonatal synesthesia, the construction of metaphor, and whether everyone is unconsciously synesthetic. In the closing chapters, Cytowic considers synesthetes' personalities, the apparent frequency of the trait among artists, and the subjective and illusory nature of what we take to be objective reality, particularly in the visual realm. The second edition has been extensively revised, reflecting the recent flood of interest in synesthesia and new knowledge of human brain function and development. More than two-thirds of the material is new.

The Man Who Tasted Shapes Richard E. Cytowic

Richard Cytowic's dinner host apologized, "There aren't enough points on the chicken!" He felt flavor also as a physical shape in his hands, and the chicken had come out "too round." This offbeat comment in 1980 launched Cytowic's exploration into the oddity called synesthesia. He is one of the few world authorities on the subject.Sharing a root with anesthesia ("no sensation"), synesthesia means "joined sensation," whereby a voice, for example, is not only heard but also seen, felt, or tasted. The trait is involuntary, hereditary, and fairly common. It stayed a scientific mystery for two centuries until Cytowic's original experiments led to a neurological explanation--and to a new concept of brain organization that accentuates emotion over reason.That chicken dinner two decades ago led Cytowic to explore a deeper reality that exists in everyone, he argues, but often just below the surface of awareness, which is why finding meaning in our lives can be elusive. In this medical detective adventure, Cytowic shows how synesthesia, far from being a mere curiosity, illuminates a wide swath of mental life and leads to a new view of what it means to be human--a view that turns upside down conventional ideas about reason, emotional knowledge, and self-understanding.This 2003 edition features a new afterword.