The neural correlates of coloured music: A functional MRI investigation of auditory–visual synaesthesia

Neufeld, Janina; Sinke, Christopher; Dillo, Wolfgang; Emrich, Hinderk M.; Szycik, Gregor R.; Dima, Danai; Bleich, Stefan; Zedler, Markus

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.11.001

Cited by 52 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Increased activation in associative cortex regions involved in higher order sensory processing has been found in ASC individuals in the visual domain (Samson et al, 2012), while increased functional connectivity between frontal areas (Noonan et al, 2009) and between posterior cingulate and medial temporal cortex (Monk et al, 2009) has been found using fMRI. In synesthesia, the parietal cortex especially has been found to be hyperactivated in different types of synesthesia (Tang et al, 2008; Rouw et al, 2011; Neufeld et al, 2012a) and this region has also been found to be more strongly connected to the sensory areas involved in inducer- and concurrent processing (van Leeuwen et al, 2011; Sinke et al, 2012; Neufeld et al, 2012b), supporting the idea of top-down modulation of sensory areas by this higher-order associative region. It has been suggested in the so-called two-stage model that a combination of both increased local connectivity between sensory brain reagions and modulation of these connections by higher-order areas may be a mechanism of synesthesia (Hubbard and Ramachandran, 2005; Hubbard, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Is synesthesia more common in patients with Asperger syndrome?

Neufeld

Roy

Zapf

et al. 2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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There is increasing evidence from case reports that synesthesia is more common in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). Further, genes related to synesthesia have also been found to be linked to ASC and, similar to synaesthetes, individuals with ASC show altered brain connectivity and unusual brain activation during sensory processing. However, up to now a systematic investigation of whether synesthesia is more common in ASC patients is missing. The aim of the current pilot study was to test this hypothesis by investigating a group of patients diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (AS) using questionnaires and standard consistency tests in order to classify them as grapheme-color synaesthetes. The results indicate that there are indeed many more grapheme-color synaesthetes among AS patients. This finding is discussed in relation to different theories regarding the development of synesthesia as well as altered sensory processing in autism.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In GCS, there is evidence of the involvement of visual, parietal, and frontal brain areas (Rouw et al, 2011), whereas involvement of the parietal cortex has also been found in sequence-space (Tang et al, 2008) and (language-unrelated) auditory-visual synesthesia (Neufeld et al, 2012a). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is synesthesia more common in patients with Asperger syndrome?

Neufeld

Roy

Zapf

et al. 2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…For the main effect of Emotion, containing three separate levels (happiness, sadness, fear), we extracted the preprocessed signal change obtained with SPM of the significant clusters of activation that survived the FWE correction by using the MarsBaR Region of Interest (ROI) toolbox for SPM (marsbar.soundforge.net; Brett et al, 2002). For this BOLD signal change (parameter estimate) extraction, we used a sphere with a 10 mm radius centered on the local maximum coordinates of the clusters of interest (see Table 1 for the cluster coordinates of the main effect of Emotion; for a similar procedure within auditory neuroimaging, see, e.g., Neufeld et al, 2012;Schulze et al, 2010). Subsequently, we conducted paired t-tests between stimulus categories on the mean signal change and retained the results that survived Bonferroni correction.…”

Section: Fmri Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Hidden sources of joy, fear, and sadness: Explicit versus implicit neural processing of musical emotions

et al. 2016

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Music is often used to regulate emotions and mood. Typically, music conveys and induces emotions even when one does not attend to them. Studies on the neural substrates of musical emotions have, however, only examined brain activity when subjects have focused on the emotional content of the music. Here we address with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) the neural processing of happy, sad, and fearful music with a paradigm in which 56 subjects were instructed to either classify the emotions (explicit condition) or pay attention to the number of instruments playing (implicit condition) in 4-sec music clips. In the implicit vs.2 explicit condition, stimuli activated bilaterally the inferior parietal lobule, premotor cortex, caudate, and ventromedial frontal areas. The cortical dorsomedial prefrontal and occipital areas activated during explicit processing were those previously shown to be associated with the cognitive processing of music and emotion recognition and regulation. Moreover, happiness in music was associated with activity in the bilateral auditory cortex, left parahippocampal gyrus, and supplementary motor area, whereas the negative emotions of sadness and fear corresponded with activation of the left anterior cingulate and middle frontal gyrus and down-regulation of the orbitofrontal cortex. Our study demonstrates for the first time in healthy subjects the neural underpinnings of the implicit processing of brief musical emotions, particularly in frontoparietal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and striatal areas of the brain.

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“…Grapheme-color synesthesia (GCS), in which achromatic letters, words or numbers are perceived in specific colors, has been extensively investigated and is believed to be one of the most common types (Simner et al, 2006). In auditory-visual synesthesia, sounds (e.g., music or single tones) can induce additional visual experiences, such as colors, forms, and textures (Ward et al, 2006; Neufeld et al, 2012a). Usually synesthetes have multiple types of synesthesia, suggesting a more global perceptual alteration underlying synesthesia rather than a specific one that only affects specific stimuli in two sensory modalities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

N1 enhancement in synesthesia during visual and audio–visual perception in semantic cross-modal conflict situations: an ERP study

Sinke

Neufeld

Wiswede

et al. 2014

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Synesthesia entails a special kind of sensory perception, where stimulation in one sensory modality leads to an internally generated perceptual experience of another, not stimulated sensory modality. This phenomenon can be viewed as an abnormal multisensory integration process as here the synesthetic percept is aberrantly fused with the stimulated modality. Indeed, recent synesthesia research has focused on multimodal processing even outside of the specific synesthesia-inducing context and has revealed changed multimodal integration, thus suggesting perceptual alterations at a global level. Here, we focused on audio–visual processing in synesthesia using a semantic classification task in combination with visually or auditory–visually presented animated and in animated objects in an audio–visual congruent and incongruent manner. Fourteen subjects with auditory-visual and/or grapheme-color synesthesia and 14 control subjects participated in the experiment. During presentation of the stimuli, event-related potentials were recorded from 32 electrodes. The analysis of reaction times and error rates revealed no group differences with best performance for audio-visually congruent stimulation indicating the well-known multimodal facilitation effect. We found enhanced amplitude of the N1 component over occipital electrode sites for synesthetes compared to controls. The differences occurred irrespective of the experimental condition and therefore suggest a global influence on early sensory processing in synesthetes.

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The neural correlates of coloured music: A functional MRI investigation of auditory–visual synaesthesia

Cited by 52 publications

References 46 publications

Is synesthesia more common in patients with Asperger syndrome?

Is synesthesia more common in patients with Asperger syndrome?

Hidden sources of joy, fear, and sadness: Explicit versus implicit neural processing of musical emotions

N1 enhancement in synesthesia during visual and audio–visual perception in semantic cross-modal conflict situations: an ERP study

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