Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia

Dr. Julia Simner is an experimental neuropsychologist and leading expert in the field of synaesthesia research. She has a background in psychology, languages and linguistics from the Universities of Oxford, Toronto and Sussex, and she runs the Synaesthesia and Sensory Integration lab at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work focusses on the sensory, cognitive, linguistic, developmental, and historical bases of synaesthesia, and has been published in high impact science journals such as Nature, Trends in Cognitive Science and Brain. She is interested in facilitating the public's understanding of science and her work has been reported in over 100 media articles world-wide, including the NY Times, BBC, CBC, Telegraph, Times, New Scientist, Scientific American etc. In 2010 she was recognised as an outstanding European scientist by the European Commission's Atomium Culture Initiative and her science writing has been published in some of Europe's leading national newspapers. Dr. Edward M. Hubbard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he directs the Educational Neuroscience Laboratory. He received degrees from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego and completed his post-doctoral training at INSERM's Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit and Vanderbilt University. He has investigated the perceptual and neural bases of grapheme-color synesthesia and synesthetic number forms for more than a decade, and his behavioural and neuroimaging work was critical in convincing the scientific community that synaesthesia was a valid, tractable topic for investigation. More recently, he has begun to investigate the neural basis of numerical and mathematical processing in non-synesthetes, and the development of these abilities in children, to better understand the neural mechanisms that lead to the development of synesthesia in children.

PART 1: ORIGINS OF SYNESTHESIA ; 1. The prevalence of synesthesia: The consistency revolution ; 2. The genetics and inheritance of synaesthesia ; 3. Synesthesia in infants and very young children ; 4. Synesthesia in school-aged children ; 5. Synesthesia, alphabet books, and fridge magnets ; PART 2: SYNESTHESIA, LANGUAGE, AND NUMBERS ; 6. Numbers, synesthesia, and directionality ; 7. Synesthesia, sequences, and space ; 8. The 'rules' of synesthesia ; 9. Colored alphabets in bilingual synesthetes ; 10. Synesthesia, meaning, and multilingual speakers ; 11. Synesthesia in non-alphabetic languages ; 12. Synesthetic personification: The social world of graphemes ; PART 3: ATTENTION AND PERCEPTION ; 13. Individual differences in synesthesia ; 14. The role of attention in synesthesia ; 15. Revisiting the perceptual reality of synesthetic color ; 16. Synesthesia and binding ; 17. Synesthesia, eye-movements, and pupillometry ; 18. Synesthesia, incongruence, and emotionality ; PART 4: CONTEMPORARY AND HISTORICAL APPROACHES ; 19. Synesthesia in the nineteenth century: Scientific origins ; 20. Synesthesia in the twentieth century: Synesthesia's renaissance ; 21. Synesthesia in the twenty-first century: Synesthesia's ascent ; 22. Synesthesia in space versus the 'mind's eye': How to ask the right questions ; 23. Synesthesia: A psychosocial approach ; PART 5: NEUROLOGICAL BASIS OF SYNESTHESIA ; 24. Synesthesia and functional imaging ; 25. Synesthesia, hyperconnectivity, and diffusion tensor imaging ; 26. Can gray matter studies inform theories of (grapheme-color) synesthesia? ; 27. Synesthesia and cortical connectivity: A neurodevelopmental perspective ; 28. The timing of neurophysiological events in synaesthesia ; 29. The use of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the investigation of synesthesia ; 30. Synesthesia, mirror neurons, and mirror-touch ; PART 6: COSTS AND BENEFITS: CREATIVITY, MEMORY, AND IMAGERY ; 31. Synesthesia and creativity ; 32. Synesthesia in the visual arts ; 33. Synesthesia in literature ; 34. Synesthesia and the artistic process ; 35. Synesthesia and memory ; 36. Synesthesia and savantism ; 37. Synesthesia, imagery, and performance ; PART 7: CROSS-MODALITY IN THE GENERAL POPULATION ; 38. Weak synesthesia in perception and language ; 39. Audiovisual cross-modal correspondences in the general population ; 40. Cross-modality in speech processing ; 41. Magnitudes, metaphors, and modalities: A theory of magnitude revisited ; 42. Sensory substitution devices: Creating 'artificial synesthesias' ; 43. Synesthesia, cross-modality, and language evolution ; PART 8: PERSPECTIVES ON SYNESTHESIA ; 44. Synesthesia: A first-person perspective ; 45. Synesthesia and consciousness ; 46. What exactly is a sense? ; 47. What synesthesia isn't ; 48. From molecules to metaphor: Outlooks on synesthesia research ; 49. Synesthesia: Where have we been? Where are we going?