So Saturday morning I woke up early, while Hannah (much like Jana) slept in to get her full 10 hours. I dressed in my conference attire and headed down to the university for registration. I found out when I got there how small the conference was-- there might have been 50 people total in attendance. We mingled for a few minutes eating tea and pastries (croissants mmmm) and looking at the small number of posters that had been set up around the room.
First of all, I noticed that the posters had not been very well-cared for, and I'm willing to bet most of them were transported with 2 rubberbands tied around them. Also, while most posters had small grammatical or spelling mistakes, others were the result of huge printing errors, in which people had to tape in pictures of graphs or whole blocks of text. I guess even making a poster for a small conference is pretty impressive, though. Most single-lecture-theater conferences simply have all-day powerpoint presentations.
I have been to a similar conference before-- you have your huge gatherings like MPA, which is held in a hotel, several rooms are used at once, and an entire ballroom area is reserved for posters. And then you have your tight-knit, single-subject conferences where the whole thing takes place in one room and everyone knows each other. The Synaesthesia conference was the latter.
Pretty soon, we were ushered into the lecture theater where the presentations were to be given, and as I situated myself, I saw Hannah (finally up), come into the room. She spotted me and quickly took the seat to my left.
"You missed pastries!" I said.
"Ugh." She made a face. "I can't eat until about 4 hours after I wake up."
We turned to the front of the room and the presentations began.
As you may already know, someone is considered a synaesthete when they confuse at least one sensory modality with another. The most common type of synaesthesia is grapheme-color, in which the subject will see each letter of the alphabet as having a specific color attributed to it, no matter what the actual color of the letter is. Most often, A is red, but it can be different depending on the synaesthete. The synaesthete sees these colors very consistently, and tested many times over, they have about a 99% accuracy in indicating which color goes with which letter across a number of tests. This shows that some people really do attribute different colors each letter. Some synaesthetes claim that they can actually see the synaesthetic color, while others say they only imagine the color in their mind's eye, but for all of them, the same color appears every time, and sometimes if a letter is presented as the "wrong" color, the synaesthete will be irritated by it.
Most of the studies were about grapheme-color synaesthesia, but as the presentations went on, we started to suspect something funny going on...
First of all, most of the synaesthesia scientists were synaesthetes, themselves. They spoke of their own experiences and many people used those experiences as the basis for their research question. One person even treated herself as a case subject. Only one presenter admitted that her being a synaesthete might actually bias her judgment, and she wasn't even a scientist-- she was from an English department. Kind of gives psychologists a bad rap, eh?
Second, many of the studies had striking methodological errors. This might be expected from a small conference such as this, but coupled with the synaesthete's high fantasy proneness and flair for the dramatic, it seemed that every presentation ended with, "As you can see, I've discovered this new and amazing thing that will alter the course of future synaesthesia research forever", as they ignored their messy, confirmatory designs.
One study looked at fMRI data from eight synaesthetes.
"Look at the brain areas that light up in all of these subjects," the experimenter said, pointing at pictures of brains that were all in a neat little row. "The brain areas that activate during synaesthetic experience are bilateral insula, left anterior cingulate cortex, right superior frontal gyrus, and left caudate tail. These areas have been found to be involved in emotion. Therefore, emotion plays a key role in synaesthesia." Whatever the hell that means.
OK, maybe you've noticed the big error here? If not, let me point it out to you. The researchers never directly measured emotion. Obvious now? They should have had synaesthetes look at emotional words, or watch an emotional movie, or they should have at least tried to make them laugh or something while their brains were being scanned. But nope-- they just let the synaesthetes do their normal, unemotional synaesthetic thing, and just because a few brain areas lit up that are sometimes involved in emotion, they decided their scans gave some kind of conclusive evidence for an integral role of emotion in synaesthesia. I bet you didn't know this, but the anterior cingulate cortex is also used in visual mental imagery. In fact, a lot of those brain areas are used for other things besides emotion. Nice try though.
One presenter (another person from an English department), looked at "synaesthetic metaphor" in WWI poetry.
"These poets claimed that being on the battlefield mixed up their senses, so that they could see the sounds of explosions and gunshots, could taste the fear in the air, feel the hurt color of blood," she said. "This was expressed in popular poetry of the time, which indicates the possibility of a universal capacity for synaesthetic expression." She went on to say that many of these poets were synaesthetes, and since people liked their poetry, were able to understand the synaestheic experience-- and perhaps we all have a propensity for synaesthesia in some form or another!
Or else, synaesthetic metaphor is not really synaesthetic. Oops. Yeah, I write "synaesthetic metaphor" all the time, and I don't claim to be synaesthetic on any level. You know why I do it though? Because in writing, it's good to involve all the senses. You don't need to be a WWI poet to understand that. And you don't have to be a synaesthete, either.
Another study claimed that there's this exciting new type of synaesthesia called "swimming-style synaesthesia" that nobody's heard of before! The evidence for this is that the experimenter is a swimmer and a synaesthete, and hey-- she saw different colors for each of the different swimming styles. Too bad she already had other forms of synaesthesia. Also, that type of synaesthesia was probably learned through expertise, and could probably be seen in expert synaesthete racecar drivers as well, or what have you.
Another study posited that normal people can learn synaesthesia through hundreds of repeated learning trials. Sorry fellas, but that's associative learning. Again, nice try.
But the most grossly-flawed study (the one which made Hannah decide not to go to the conference at all on day 2, on principle) is as follows:
The study looked at 13 grapheme-color synaesthetes using a color-priming paradigm. This means that subjects had to look at a computer screen, and a letter (the prime) would flash onto the screen. After a delay, that same letter (the probe) would appear again. The letters were sometimes colored synaesthetically. The experimenter had to ask each synaesthete what their specific letter-colors were to make letters the synaesthetic color.
So, for example: say subject 1 saw the letter A as red. So the different categories of trials are as follows:
1) Prime (red) Probe (red) -- synaesthetically congruent*
2) Prime (blue) Probe (blue) -- print congruent, but not synaesthetically congruent
3) Prime (red) Probe (blue) -- incongruent
4) Prime (blue) Probe (red) -- incongruent
The experimenters found that synaesthetes were faster at identifying the probe when both prime and probe letters appeared as the synaesthetic color (category 1), than in any other condition. This, they said, not only proves that synaesthesia exists, but that greater mental imagery makes synaesthetes faster than controls on this task.
OK first, they studied expectancies (i.e., expecting the probe to be the same color as the prime), not imagery. COmpletely different internal processes. But that's not the worst thing. Hannah caught this: the experimenters never masked their primes! Masking, for those of you who don't know, involves presenting a picture (such as a circle of TV white noise) on the screen in between the prime and the probe. Without a mask, the after-image of the prime will remain for hundreds of milliseconds (and in a reaction time task like this, milliseconds are everything).
So no matter what their conclusions were, their study was complete crap from the get-go. No mask means no way of knowing whether results came from the long exposure to the prime or not.
Boy, did we tear the presenters apart. But it was unfair of them to put their "Synaesthetic AA meeting" under the guise of an academic conference.
Not only that, but they never convinced me that synaesthesia actually exists. While they claimed that synaesthesia leads to heightened imagery, creativity, fantasy proneness, and memory-- maybe synaesthesia is a symptom of a combination of all those things. In my opinion, synaesthesia seems likely to result from some mild form of OCD. In effect, a symptom... not a "disorder" in itself.
But the conference wasn't a complete loss. It was a good test of our methodological knowledge, and showed that we have actually learned something from our Masters course, yippee hooray. Also, it was admittedly cool hearing the synaesthetes' personal experiences, even though a scientific conference is not the place for them.
There were a couple of big names there as well that nobody would have heard of before, though one of them wrote my undergraduate Cogntive Neuroscience textbook though, so that is pretty cool.
Okay, done with conference rant-- may update more later, but I'm going to practice my presentation some more now.
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