Synesthesia and the McGurk Effect

Synesthesia is when several senses are activated by one stimulus; a "crossing" of the senses, such as words with color, people with smells, tastes with shapes, even music with colors. It has a prevalence of about 1% of the population (link). (Wiki)

Our linguistic comprehension system uses a combination of visual and auditory information (when available) to figure out what sort of sounds are coming out of the other person's mouth. The McGurk effect is what happens when deviouscurious cognitive linguists trip up this system by dubbing one sound over a video of someone saying another sound. This is really best demonstrated by this video: VIDEO!!! (Wiki)

So, a coupla researchers who knew about these phenomena thought, hey, I wonder if synesthetes who associate colors with words will experience different colors when they're put under the spell of the McGurk effect. What a rad question, and a great way to prove the validity of synesthesia, which in my opinion, is kinda hard to get your head around if you don't have it. (the first few times I read about it, I was thinking, well couldn't these people just be making it up? O subjectivity, how unprovable thee art!...except when someone designs a cool experiment like this). Check out the article from ScienceBlogs: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2010/01/synesthesia_and_the_mcgurk_eff.php

Or the article on the SciBlog article from MindHacks: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/01/beyond_crossed_sense.html

MadCog