Chimps Experience Synesthetic Sense-Intermingling, Like Humans Do

[xchrom]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chimps-experience-synesthetic-sense-like-humans

Chimpanzees meld sounds and colours, associating light objects with high tones and dark objects with deeper tones.

The finding hints that chimps, like humans, experience some form of synaesthesia, an uncommon condition in which the senses become intertwined, says Vera Ludwig, a cognitive neuroscientist at Charité Medical University in Berlin, Germany, who led a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Some synaesthetes associate different colours with letters and numbers, for instance, whereas others taste shapes.

Nearly all humans tend to link high-pitched sounds with lighter, brighter hues and bass-filled sounds with dark shades. People judge high vowels, such as 'mil', as white, for example, and consider lower-toned syllables, such as 'mol', as black. Ludwig thinks such connections represent a mild form of synaesthesia, with both emerging from neural cross-wiring between nearby brain regions involved in processing senses.

To determine whether humans learn to associate sounds and colours from others, or whether they are innate and do not require language, Ludwig searched for the associations in captive chimpanzees.

[AlecBGreen]

1. fascinating, thanks!

:hi:

[Odin2005]

2. Chimps are awesome!

:)