Abstract

Synesthesia is a condition under which a sensory stimulus in a certain modality elicits perceptual experience in another modality along with perceptual experience in the relevant modality. Attempts to unveil neural mechanisms of synesthesia have increased with the accumulation of psychophysical and cognitive psychological studies investigating the authenticity and perceptual reality of synesthesia. This work reviews research on the neural mechanisms of synesthesia for last 20 years or so. First, this work compares representative neural models on synesthesia and introduces genetic approaches to synesthesia to investigate the cause for synesthesia. Second, this work discusses a number of brain imaging and ERP studies to explore whether synesthetic experiences are mediated by the shared neural mechanisms and neural information processing stages underlying real sensory experiences.