Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Steffie Tomson: Living Color
Season 2011 Episode 15 | 2m 7s | Video has closed captioning.
Steffie Tomson: Living Color
Aired: 02/01/11
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Season 2011 Episode 15 | 2m 7s | Video has closed captioning.
Steffie Tomson: Living Color
Aired: 02/01/11
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
(dramatic music) (bright music) - So synesthesia is a perceptual condition that's completely harmless.
We sort of call it a blending of the senses.
So you have letters associated with colors and music associated with colors and tastes associated with shapes.
All kinds of great sensory interplay going on.
Synesthesia is not a memory.
It's more of sort of an automatic binding.
So purple becomes a property of J.
One synesthete that we have worked with, she has these automatic associations between letters and colors.
She's also an editor for a newspaper, and she uses her colors to help her spell check.
If cat has the wrong three colors in it, then it's misspelled.
Another synesthete that we've talked to, letters induce not only color for him, but also a taste.
One of his good friends is named Eric.
He hates saying the name because apparently the taste of Eric is like ear wax to him.
So we use functional MRI to look at synesthete's brains.
We show them a 12 minute clip of "Sesame Street" that's in black and white, because we don't want the people to be seeing color.
And what we're looking for is to see how the color areas and the letter areas are active.
The reason that we are studying synesthesia is because synesthesia is an example of how abnormal network connections can form.
Such as autism, schizophrenia, ADD.
So if we can understand how this is happening in a harmless condition, then maybe we can understand what's gone wrong in a harmful disease.
(bright music) Science is sort of like exploring for your job.
(upbeat music)