On the Nature of Synesthesia: A Learned Association or Something More?

Synesthesia is a phenomenon that has captivated the interest of many researchers, as it is a unique experience of the blending of the senses. The following study was conducted in an effort to understand whether synesthetic experiences can be learned, as a 2014 paper claimed. While there has been much research demonstrating that synesthesia is more common than previously thought, and likely to develop in young children as a learning mechanism, the amount of available event-related brain potential (ERP) studies on synesthesia are much less available. The current study, utilizes pre- and post-test ERP data from participants to understand whether a learned association or synesthetic experience occurred during the 4 weeks of training on letter-color and music-color association task. The difference between the pre- and post-ERP tests was analyzed to determine if such training altered three specific ERP components believed to resemble the ERP of synesthetes.