Dr Mitchell will describe how our brains actively construct our perceptions and how variation in genes can alter perception. He will reveal surprising differences in the way people see (or more generally sense) the world and will describe the work in progress in his TCD lab on synaesthesia.
Synaesthesia (meaning “mixing of the senses”) is a heritable condition of involuntary sensory cross-activation whereby particular stimuli elicit secondary sensory-perceptual experiences. These may include, for example, experiencing colours in response to sounds, words, music, letters, smells and many other stimuli, tasting words, personification of numbers, spatial locations for numbers, dates, letters, perceiving shapes in response to taste and many other forms.