Periodically, the ASA website will invite a respected researcher in the field of synesthesia to select an article to highlight for our "Article in Lights" section.

We are pleased to announce that Mike Dixon, who was an ASA Keynote Speaker, has made his recent paper, THE ROLE OF MEANING IN GRAPHEME-COLOUR SYNAESTHESIA available for downloading.

This article results from an ASA conference-inspired collaboration between scientists and a non-scientist-synesthete. ASA conferences are celebrated for bringing together a multi-disciplinary mix of scientists, synesthetes and researchers of all kinds. In this case, those brought together were ASA 2007 conference keynote speaker, Dr. Mike Dixon and his University of Waterloo synesthesia research team of Merikle-Smilek-Zanna, and synesthete-author Patricia Lynne Duffy.

Authors: Mike J. Dixon, Daniel Smilek, Patricia L. Duffy, Mark P. Zanna and Philip M. Merikle

Please go to http://www.cortex-online.org/

Once at the Cortex website:
1. Select "Quick Search" and type in 'Dixon'
2. Select Author in the Option search field
3. Click go find the paper
4. Click on the title of the paper
5. Click download


The following article was chosen by researcher Jamie Ward. The article, Synesthetic Colors Determined by Having Colored Refrigerator Magnets in Childhood by Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA) shows a case where early environmental influences (i.e., colored refrigerator magnets) influenced the shaping of a subject's colored-letter synesthesia. This article will certainly fuel the debate over where synesthetic colors come from.

Witthoft.pdf


Our recent "Article in Lights", Emotionally Mediated Synaesthesia by Jamie Ward, University College London, UK, was selected by noted research psychologist Dr. Mike Dixon of the University of Waterloo, Ontario.

Emotionally Mediated Synaesthesia is about synesthesia and auras and had everybody talking at the UC Berkeley ASA conference.

Ward-04.pdf


This page is edited by Pat Duffy and Carol Steen.