What color is the letter?

Grapheme-color synesthesia - the ability to "see" the letters in color known to scientists for a long time. But the mechanisms of its occurrence in different people, and developing the brain's response to it have long remained unknown.

Professor Bruno Leng of the University of Oslo, along with colleagues from the University of Bergen have shown that the strength of the observed brain activity correlated with the similarity of colors. This means that the same brain regions which provide color recognition, also provide vision synesthetic colors, which allows to "see" the two colors in one and the same time. This confirms the view that the phenomenon of color synesthesia   a phenomenon associated with the perception (perception).

The study authors also found that the similarity between the physical and synaesthetic color affects the level of activity in the area of ​​the brain that is responsible for processing color.

In studies, published in the journal Cortex, for the study of brain activity in two people with grapheme-color synesthesia   It was used functional magnetic resonance imaging - participants in the experiment were placed in an MRI scanner and showed the letters in different colors.

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