Photo © Razvan Tulai
The news comes from an article featured in the “Psychological Science” journal which claims that hypnosis can induce synesthesia, a neurologically-based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.
The researchers contradict the point of view in which synesthesia was a result of extra connections in the synesthetes brain. Instead, they believe the cause involves more “cross-talking” between brain areas, which can be reached by changing inhibitory processes in the average brain.
During the testing, the research team induced synesthetic experiences through post-hypnotic suggestions. The form of synesthesia that they approached is grapheme → color synesthesia, in which an individual’s perception of numbers and letters is associated with the experience of colors.
The researchers saw that after inducing digit-color synesthesia through hypnosis, the volunteers had similar experiences to those of real synesthetes in their everyday life.
“Our study shows that hypnosis can induce synesthetic experiences in people, suggesting that extra brain connections are not needed to experience cross-sensory interactions and that it is a change in inhibitory processes – more cross talk within the brain – that causes these experiences. This takes us one step closer to understanding the causes of synesthesia and abnormal cross-brain interactions,” said Cohen Kadosh, one of the researchers.
Article by Lucia Grosaru
