synesthesia and the binding problem

While I was an undergrad at Cal, I worked for a semester in the Robertson Visual Attention Lab with graduate student Noam Sagiv, researching synesthesia - a phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses. Examples include letters and numbers having colors, sounds eliciting images (no psychedelics necessary!), and touch causing tastes.

Some of our research shed some light on what is known as the binding problem - the mismatch between our unified conscious experience of the world and the fairly well established fact that sensory processing occurs in distinct, specialized regions of the brain (e.g., a color area, a shape area, etc). I recently stumbled across this review article in which Lynn Robertson, head of the lab I had worked for, reviews these issues including some of the findings of our work. If you're into cognitive science, it's worth checking out!

You can scope the summary or the full article.