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An extended case study on the phenomenology of sequence-space synesthesia.

ABSTRACT: Investigation of synesthesia phenomenology in adults is needed to constrain accounts of developmental trajectories of this trait. We report an extended phenomenological investigation of sequence-space synesthesia in a single case (AB). We used the Elicitation Interview (EI) method to facilitate repeated exploration of AB's synesthetic experience. During an EI the subject's attention is selectively guided by the interviewer in order to reveal precise details about the experience. Detailed analysis of the resulting 9 h of interview transcripts provided a comprehensive description of AB's synesthetic experience, including several novel observations. For example, we describe a specific spatial reference frame (a "mental room") in which AB's concurrents occur, and which overlays his perception of the real world (the "physical room"). AB is able to switch his attention voluntarily between this mental room and the physical room. Exemplifying the EI method, some of our observations were previously unknown even to AB. For example, AB initially reported to experience concurrents following visual presentation, yet we determined that in the majority of cases the concurrent followed an internal verbalization of the inducer, indicating an auditory component to sequence-space synesthesia. This finding is congruent with typical rehearsal of inducer sequences during development, implicating cross-modal interactions between auditory and visual systems in the genesis of this synesthetic form. To our knowledge, this paper describes the first application of an EI to synesthesia, and the first systematic longitudinal investigation of the first-person experience of synesthesia since the re-emergence of interest in this topic in the 1980's. These descriptions move beyond rudimentary graphical or spatial representations of the synesthetic spatial form, thereby providing new targets for neurobehavioral analysis.

SUBMITTER: Gould C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4080762 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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An extended case study on the phenomenology of sequence-space synesthesia.

Gould Cassandra C Froese Tom T Barrett Adam B AB Ward Jamie J Seth Anil K AK

Frontiers in human neuroscience 20140703

Investigation of synesthesia phenomenology in adults is needed to constrain accounts of developmental trajectories of this trait. We report an extended phenomenological investigation of sequence-space synesthesia in a single case (AB). We used the Elicitation Interview (EI) method to facilitate repeated exploration of AB's synesthetic experience. During an EI the subject's attention is selectively guided by the interviewer in order to reveal precise details about the experience. Detailed analysi ...[more]

PMID: 25071498

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Project description:BackgroundSynesthesia is a sensory phenomenon where certain domain-specific stimuli trigger additional sensations of e.g. color or texture. The condition occurs in about 4% of the general population, but is overrepresented in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where it might also be associated with the presence of prodigious talents.Case presentationHere we describe the case of a young transsexual man with Asperger Syndrome, synesthesia and a prodigious talent for foreign language acquisition. In our case, not only letters, numbers, spoken words, music, noises, weekdays and months lead to highly consistent, vivid color sensations but also his own and others' emotions, geometric shapes, any mathematical symbol, and letters from an unfamiliar alphabet (Hebrew). These color associations seem to aid categorization, differentiation and storage of information and might thereby contribute to the young man's language acquisition ability. We investigated the young man's structural brain connectivity in comparison to adults with or without ASD, applying global fiber tracking to diffusion-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data. The case presented with increased connectivity, especially between regions involved in visual and emotion processing, memory, and higher order associative binding regions. An electroencephalography experiment investigating synesthetic color and shape sensations while listening to music showed a negligible occipital alpha suppression, indicating that these internally generated synesthetic sensations derive from a different brain mechanism than when processing external visual information.ConclusionsTaken together, this case study endorses the notion of a link between synesthesia, prodigious talent and autism, adding to the currently still sparse literature in this field. It provides new insights into the possible manifestations of synesthesia in individuals with ASD and its potential contribution to prodigious talents in people with an otherwise unexceptional cognitive profile. Additionally, this case impressively illustrates how synesthesia can be a key element not only of sensory perception but also social and emotional processing and contributes to existing evidence of increased brain connectivity in association with synesthesia.

Project description:BACKGROUND: Many proposed statistical measures can efficiently compare protein sequence to further infer protein structure, function and evolutionary information. They share the same idea of using k-word frequencies of protein sequences. Given a protein sequence, the information on its related protein sequences hasn't been used for protein sequence comparison until now. This paper proposed a scheme to construct protein 'sequence space' which was associated with protein sequences related to the given protein, and the performances of statistical measures were compared when they explored the information on protein 'sequence space' or not. This paper also presented two statistical measures for protein: gre.k (generalized relative entropy) and gsm.k (gapped similarity measure). RESULTS: We tested statistical measures based on protein 'sequence space' or not with three data sets. This not only offers the systematic and quantitative experimental assessment of these statistical measures, but also naturally complements the available comparison of statistical measures based on protein sequence. Moreover, we compared our statistical measures with alignment-based measures and the existing statistical measures. The experiments were grouped into two sets. The first one, performed via ROC (Receiver Operating Curve) analysis, aims at assessing the intrinsic ability of the statistical measures to discriminate and classify protein sequences. The second set of the experiments aims at assessing how well our measure does in phylogenetic analysis. Based on the experiments, several conclusions can be drawn and, from them, novel valuable guidelines for the use of protein 'sequence space' and statistical measures were obtained. CONCLUSION: Alignment-based measures have a clear advantage when the data is high redundant. The more efficient statistical measure is the novel gsm.k introduced by this article, the cos.k followed. When the data becomes less redundant, gre.k proposed by us achieves a better performance, but all the other measures perform poorly on classification tasks. Almost all the statistical measures achieve improvement by exploring the information on 'sequence space' as word's length increases, especially for less redundant data. The reasonable results of phylogenetic analysis confirm that Gdis.k based on 'sequence space' is a reliable measure for phylogenetic analysis. In summary, our quantitative analysis verifies that exploring the information on 'sequence space' is a promising way to improve the abilities of statistical measures for protein comparison.

Dataset Information

An extended case study on the phenomenology of sequence-space synesthesia.

Publications

An extended case study on the phenomenology of sequence-space synesthesia.

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