Working in Movement

Cognition and sensing are different activities -- or are they? Rainbow Coalition of the Brain flings open the question by reporting on synesthesia, the kind of mixing up of information from the senses.

Imagine every time you hear the telephone ring, you taste a burrito with jalapeño and guacamole. Believe it or not, some people -- synesthetes -- experience things just like that.

You'd think that such sensory confusion would result in, well, confusion that might make it hard to think about or do stuff. Maybe not. Synaesthete makes sweet music describes a musician who "tastes" sounds as she listens to and plays music. A research team worked with her to see if there were any advantages to her ability. The team tested the musician by playing tone intervals at the same time they delivered different tastes to her tongue. Sometimes the tastes were the same as the ones she'd reported earlier as belonging to that tone, and other times the delivered tastes were different, clashing ones.

They found that she was able to identify the intervals much more quickly when the taste matched the one that she says she normally associates with it. That kind of pattern would be difficult to fake, Jäncke says. He reports the results in Nature.

"With incongruent taste she was sometimes slower than other musicians; she is extraordinarily quick usually," he says. "The synaesthesia is kind of boosting her performance. Her hit rate was perfect, but the difference was in the reaction times."

So rather than hindering the musician, the synesthesia seems to offer some advantage, sharpening the way she experiences music.

Could there be other advantages to the ability? Maybe, according to Lutz Jäncke, a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland:

"One might speculate that this could be a good analogue for learning: our skills are improved if we associate the item we learn with many other items. It may also demonstrate that synaesthesia may be modified for learning and used for other things."

Always seems to come back to learning, eh?