YOUR SENSE OF THE WORLD AND MOVEMENT WITHIN ITexperiencing synaesthetic-like sensations, they also had difficulty
perceiving a number when it was presented against a background that
matched the colour they’d associated with it ( just as you’d expect to
happen with a true synaesthete). Kadosh’s team concluded that they
had induced synaesthesia, and that extra neural connections couldn’t
possibly have developed in that time, so there must some other expla-
nation for the condition. One possibility, they argued, is that normal
brains inhibit many of the connections between sensory areas, with this
suppression being missing in people with synaesthesia and those under
hypnosis. An alternative argument is that the wiring account of synaes-
thesia is accurate, and that hypnotic synaesthesia, though it leads to a
similar effect to true synaesthesia, is induced via a completely different
neural mechanism.
Another recent discovery in the field of synaesthesia research is that
the condition may have as much to do with concepts as with the senses.
In a study by Julia Simner and her colleague Jamie Ward, tip-of-the-
tongue states were induced in a group of people with lexical-gustatory
synaesthesia by showing them pictures of obscure objects. Focusing on
those instances when the participants said they knew what the object was
but just couldn’t quite think of its name, the researchers discovered that
when the participants had a word on the tip of their tongues (“castanets”,
for example), it triggered the same taste (for example, of tuna) as when
they were told the actual word. It was as if the concept of a castanet,
rather than the word itself, triggered the associated taste.