Reading acquisition is enabled by deep changes in the brain\'s visual system and language areas, and in the links subtending their collaboration. Disruption of those plastic processes commonly results in developmental dyslexia. However, atypical development of reading mechanisms may occasionally result in ticker-tape synesthesia (TTS), a condition described by Francis Galton in 1883 wherein individuals \"see mentally in print every word that is uttered (…) as from a long imaginary strip of paper\". While reading is the bottom-up translation of letters into speech, TTS may be viewed as its opposite, the top-down translation of speech into internally visualized letters. In a series of functional MRI experiments, we studied MK, a man with TTS. We showed that a set of left-hemispheric areas were more active in MK than in controls during the perception of normal than reversed speech, including frontoparietal areas involved in speech processing, and the Visual Word Form Area, an occipitotemporal region subtending orthography. Those areas were identical to those involved in reading, supporting the construal of TTS as upended reading. Using dynamic causal modeling, we further showed that, parallel to reading, TTS induced by spoken words and pseudowords relied on top-down flow of information along distinct lexical and phonological routes, involving the middle temporal and supramarginal gyri, respectively. Future studies of TTS should shed new light on the neurodevelopmental mechanisms of reading acquisition, their variability and their disorders.

We report on a musician who acquired synesthesia, enhanced sensory experience, and improved creativity following traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Creativity and synesthesia can be acquired from an injury, though both simultaneously has not been frequently documented.
This case report details heightened creativity and developing synesthesia in a 66-year-old right-handed man following TBI. He developed a \"compulsion\" to write music. Synesthesia included \"seeing\" the notation and being able to name chord structures of music he heard, both of which were novel experiences. The Synesthesia Battery revealed a vision-sound synesthesia with higher than average level of Vividness of Visual Imagery (VVIQ-2), and \"Absolute Pitch/Perfect Pitch.\"
The patient experienced an approximate four-month history of these changes, including musical compositions, developing perfect pitch, and enhanced sensory experience of typical phenomena.
Both creativity and synesthesia depend on novel connections in the brain, and both have been reported following insults to the brain, including in degenerative conditions. However, the development of both simultaneously is not frequently reported. Evidence for the etiology of one prompting the other has not been described. Brain injury may result in increased creativity and synesthesia. Our fields would benefit from increased awareness of this possible relationship.

The aim of this paper was to assess the genuineness of a case of phoneme color synesthesia (VA) by evaluating the influence of several psycholinguistic levels with different stimuli (isolated vowels, nonsense syllables, and words). Results demonstrate the robustness of the synesthesia no matter what the type of stimuli. To explore how this form of synesthesia manifested itself in everyday conversation, interviews were also conducted. VA reported that, in the context of conversation, phonemes still evoked colors that she had to translate in order to access the meaning. She also reported that her mental representations were multisensorial and that the verbal dimension was almost non-existent. We address several implications of this phoneme color synesthesia: the atypical speech perception that it implies, the cognitive cost of this stable system, and its relation to a specific cognitive functioning.

Objective: Synesthesia is a unique experience with an unclear mechanism. The clinical condition usually presents when a sensation stimulates other senses. While more than 150 types of synesthesia have been reported; however, some types are considered uncommon, and co-occurrence of these rare types of synesthesia are rare. In the present report, we described a case of synesthesia with experience of pain and orgasm in color. Method : A 31-year old healthy male presented with visual equity changes during orgasm. In addition, he described a color-pain sensation every time he experienced severe chest pain during his childhood. None of these sensations negatively affected his daily or sexual life. Based on the patient\'s history, a possible diagnosis of synesthesia was made and further clinical evaluations were performed. Results: The patient did not have any color vision abnormalities or problems in solving Hooper visual organization test, bells test, Rey complex figure test, card sorting test, and Trail making tests. The Brief Male Sexual Inventory did not reveal any sexual dysfunction. Therefore, regarding the patient\'s experiences without any visual disturbance and absence of any underlying diseases, the diagnosis of synesthesia was made. Conclusion: The present report demonstrates coexistence of a rare form of synesthesia as orgasm to color with specific pain to color synesthesia. In contrast to previous reports, our case demonstrated color orgasm as a type of synesthesia that might not negatively affect sex life in men.

The specific architectural typology of the prison, congenitally inaccessible to the urban morphological and cultural context in which it sets, as heterotopia carries in itself physical and cognitive barriers. The day after their abandonment, as happened for the former prison of Buoncammino in Cagliari, it\'s interesting to understand what new relationships should be put in place to make it accessible to all of the city users, in both material and immaterial terms.

Synesthesia is a sensory phenomenon where certain domain-specific stimuli trigger additional sensations of e.g. color or texture. The condition occurs in about 4% of the general population, but is overrepresented in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where it might also be associated with the presence of prodigious talents.
Here we describe the case of a young transsexual man with Asperger Syndrome, synesthesia and a prodigious talent for foreign language acquisition. In our case, not only letters, numbers, spoken words, music, noises, weekdays and months lead to highly consistent, vivid color sensations but also his own and others\' emotions, geometric shapes, any mathematical symbol, and letters from an unfamiliar alphabet (Hebrew). These color associations seem to aid categorization, differentiation and storage of information and might thereby contribute to the young man\'s language acquisition ability. We investigated the young man\'s structural brain connectivity in comparison to adults with or without ASD, applying global fiber tracking to diffusion-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data. The case presented with increased connectivity, especially between regions involved in visual and emotion processing, memory, and higher order associative binding regions. An electroencephalography experiment investigating synesthetic color and shape sensations while listening to music showed a negligible occipital alpha suppression, indicating that these internally generated synesthetic sensations derive from a different brain mechanism than when processing external visual information.
Taken together, this case study endorses the notion of a link between synesthesia, prodigious talent and autism, adding to the currently still sparse literature in this field. It provides new insights into the possible manifestations of synesthesia in individuals with ASD and its potential contribution to prodigious talents in people with an otherwise unexceptional cognitive profile. Additionally, this case impressively illustrates how synesthesia can be a key element not only of sensory perception but also social and emotional processing and contributes to existing evidence of increased brain connectivity in association with synesthesia.

Here we present the case of SP, a 21-year-old female with life-long dyscalculia. SP was subsequently diagnosed with grapheme-color synesthesia, a diagnosis that serendipitously catalyzed our development of a novel aid:The digit-color calculator (DCC). The DCC substantiates SP\'s color concurrents, dramatically ameliorating her difficulties with basic calculations. We envisage the DCC and its analogues may assist others in educational settings, particularly if they experience difficulties with the acquisition of literacy and numeracy. Further devices that leverage synesthesia may also have the potential to improve the quality of life for others with trait synesthesia regardless of concomitant disorder.

We investigated the effect of a sweetness blocker on the synesthetic taste experience of a rare color-gustatory synesthete, E.C., for whom specific colors elicit unique tastes. Blocking E.C.\'s sweetness receptors while the tongue was otherwise unstimulated left other taste components of the synesthesia unaltered but initially reduced her synesthetic sweetness, which suggests a peripheral modulation of the synesthetic illusion.

This study was a case investigation of grapheme-texture synestheste TH, a female who subjectively reported experiencing a visual association between grapheme and colour/texture. First, we validated the existence of a synesthetic association in an objective manner. Involuntarily elicited experience is a major hallmark that is common to different types of synesthetes. Our results indicated interference between physical and synesthetic texture, suggesting the involuntary occurrence of synesthetic textural experience. We analysed the behavioural measures using the EZ diffusion model. The result suggested that TH\'s synesthetic experience was dissociable from that of briefly trained associative processing of non-synesthetes. Second, we investigated how the synesthetic experience of colour and texture dimensions was bound in the visual representation. We found that the interference effects of colour and texture were not independent. This suggested that in the elicited experience, the colour and texture features construct an integrated representation.

In this study we show that personality traits predict the physical qualities of mentally generated colours, using the case of synaesthesia. Developmental grapheme-colour synaesthetes have the automatic lifelong association of colours paired to letters or digits. Although these colours are internal mental constructs, they can be measured along physical dimensions such as saturation and luminance. The personality of synaesthetes can also be quantified using self-report questionnaires relating, for example, to the five major traits of Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. In this paper, we bring together both types of quality by examining whether the personality of individual synaesthetes predicts their synaesthetic colours. Twenty grapheme-colour synaesthetes were tested with the Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality questionnaire. Their synaesthesia was also tested in terms of consistency and average colour saturation and luminance. Two major results were found: although personality did not influence the overall robustness (i.e., consistency) of synaesthesia, it predicted the nature of synaesthetes\' colours: the trait of Openness was positively correlated with the saturation of synaesthetic colours. Our study provides evidence that personality and internal perception are intertwined, and suggests future avenues of research for investigating the associations between the two.