The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a fascinating phenomenon which has captured the imagination of scientists and artists alike. This inherited condition gives rise to a kind of 'merging of the senses', and so for those who experience it, everyday activities like reading or listening to music trigger extraordinary impressions of colours, tastes, smells, shapes and other sensations. Synesthesia research also informs us about normal sensation because all people experience cross-sensory mappings to an implicit degree. Synesthesia has a considerably broad appeal, and in recent decades the field has experienced a resurgence of interest. These advances have painted a detailed story about the development, genetics, psychology, history, aesthetics and neuroscience of synesthesia, and provide a contemporary source of study for a new generation of scholars.

The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia brings together this broad body of knowledge into one definitive state-of-the-art handbook. It includes a large number of concisely written chapters, under broader headings, which tackle questions about the origins of synesthesia, its neurological basis, its links with language and numbers, attention and perception, and with 'normal' sensory and linguistic processing. It asks questions about synesthesia's role in language evolution, and presents both contemporary and historical overviews of the field. It shows synaesthesia's costs and benefits (e.g., in creativity, memory, imagery) and describes how synaesthesia can provide inspiration for artists and designers. The book ends with a series of perspectives on synesthesia, including a first-hand account, and philosophical viewpoints which show how synaesthesia poses unique questions about sensation, consciousness and the nature of reality.

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 currently 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 keenly 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, Donielle Johnson, Carrie Allison, and Simon Baron-Cohen
2. The genetics and inheritance of synaesthesia, Julian E. Asher and Duncan A. Carmichael
3. Synesthesia in infants and very young children, Daphne Maurer, Laura C. Gibson, and Ferrinne Spector
4. Synesthesia in school-aged children, Julia Simner and Edward M. Hubbard
5. Synesthesia, alphabet books, and fridge magnets, Peter Hancock
Part 2: Synesthesia, Language, and Numbers
6. Numbers, synesthesia, and directionality, Roi Cohen Kadosh and Avishai Henik
7. Synesthesia, sequences, and space, Clare Jonas and Michelle Jarick
8. The 'rules' of synesthesia, Julia Simner
9. Colored alphabets in bilingual synesthetes, Aleksandra Mroczko-Wasowicz and Danko Nikolic
10. Synesthesia, meaning, and multilingual speakers, Fiona N. Newell
11. Synesthesia in non-alphabetic languages, Wan-Yu Hung
12. Synesthetic personification: The social world of graphemes, Monika Sobczak-Edmans and Noam Sagiv
Part 3: Attention and Perception
13. Individual differences in synesthesia, Tessa M. van Leeuwen
14. The role of attention in synesthesia, Anina N. Rich and Jason B. Mattingley
15. Revisiting the perceptual reality of synesthetic color, Chai-Youn Kim and Randolph Blake
16. Synesthesia and binding, Bryan D. Alvarez and Lynn C. Robertson
17. Synesthesia, eye-movements, and pupillometry, Tanja C. W. Nijboer and Bruno Laeng
18. Synesthesia, incongruence, and emotionality, Alicia Callejas and Juan Lupi an ez
Part 4: Contemporary and Historical Approaches
19. Synesthesia in the nineteenth century: Scientific origins, Jorg Jewanski
20. Synesthesia in the twentieth century: Synesthesia's renaissance, Richard E. Cytowic
21. Synesthesia in the twenty-first century: Synesthesia's ascent, Christopher T. Lovelace
22. Synesthesia in space versus the 'mind's eye': How to ask the right questions, Christine Mohr
23. Synesthesia: A psychosocial approach, Markus Zedler and Marie Rehme
Part 5: Neurological Basis of Synesthesia
24. Synesthesia and functional imaging, Edward M. Hubbard
25. Synesthesia, hyperconnectivity, and diffusion tensor imaging, Romke Rouw
26. Can gray matter studies inform theories of (grapheme-color) synesthesia?, Peter H. Weiss
27. Synesthesia and cortical connectivity: A neurodevelopmental perspective, Kevin J. Mitchell
28. The timing of neurophysiological events in synaesthesia, Lutz Jancke
29. The use of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the investigation of synesthesia, Neil G. Muggleton and Elias Tsakanikos
30. Synesthesia, mirror neurons, and mirror-touch, Michael J. Banissy
Part 6: Costs and Benefits: Creativity, Memory, and Imagery
31. Synesthesia and creativity, Catherine M. Mulvenna
32. Synesthesia in the visual arts, Cretien van Campen
33. Synesthesia in literature, Patricia Lynne Duffy
34. Synesthesia and the artistic process, Carol Steen and Greta Berman
35. Synesthesia and memory, Beat Meier and Nicolas Rothen
36. Synesthesia and savantism, Mary Jane Spiller and Ashok S. Jansari
37. Synesthesia, imagery, and performance, Mark C. Price
Part 7: Cross-Modality in the General Population
38. Weak synesthesia in perception and language, Lawrence E. Marks
39. Audiovisual cross-modal correspondences in the general population, Cesare Parise and Charles Spence
40. Cross-modality in speech processing, Argiro Vatakis
41. Magnitudes, metaphors, and modalities: A theory of magnitude revisited, Vincent E. Walsh
42. Sensory substitution devices: Creating 'artificial synesthesias', Laurent Renier and Anne G. De Volder
43. Synesthesia, cross-modality, and language evolution, Christine Cuskley and Simon Kirby
Part 8: Perspectives on Synesthesia
44. Synesthesia: A first-person perspective, Sean A. Day
45. Synesthesia and consciousness, Noam Sagiv and Chris D. Frith
46. What exactly is a sense?, Brian L. Keeley
47. What synesthesia isn't, Mary-Ellen Lynall and Colin Blakemore
48. From molecules to metaphor: Outlooks on synesthesia research, V. S. Ramachandran and David Brang
49. Synesthesia: Where have we been? Where are we going?, Jamie Ward