Projekt

Binding together of information within and between the senses plays an important role in normal perception of the world, and for such integration to cope with changing relationships between sensory stimuli, the neural mechanisms responsible must be plastic. In this project the phenomenon of synaesthesia will be studied, which can be viewed as "pathological" example of integrative processes. In addition to studies on normal and blind synaethetes the work will be extended to "implicit" synaesthetes with highly reproducible idiosyncratic sensory association but no conscious experience of the associated stimulus. Psychophysical approaches will be used to discover whether new implicit synaesthetic linkages can be learned, and a full range of neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, MEG, EEG, TMS) to distinguish between the possible pathways that mediate both the normal cross-modal interactions and synaesthesia.The results should lead to a better understanding of normal and unusual functional connectivity in the human brain, and should contribute to our knowledge of cortical plasticity and its dynamics in the normal, the excessively cross-wired and the visually deprived brain.

• Prof. Dr. Petra Stoerig

  Universität Düsseldorf
  Institut für Experimentelle Psychologie II
  Düsseldorf
  

• Prof. Dr. Peter Hagoort

  Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition
  and Behaviour at Radboud Universiteit
  Nijmegen
  Nijmegen
  Niederlande
  

• Prof. Colin Blakemore

  University of Oxford
  Department of Physiology, Anatomy
  and Genetics
  Le Gros Clark Building
  Oxford
  Grossbritannien