Intrinsic network connectivity reflects consistency of synesthetic experiences

Studying cognitive processes underlying synesthesia, a condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality automatically leads to abnormal additional sensory perception, allows insights into the neural mechanisms of normal and abnormal cross-modal sensory processing. Consistent with the notion th...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of neuroscience 2012-05, Vol.32 (22), p.7614-7621
Main Authors: Dovern, Anna, Fink, Gereon R, Fromme, A Christina B, Wohlschläger, Afra M, Weiss, Peter H, Riedl, Valentin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Auditory Perception - physiology
Brain - blood supply
Brain - pathology
Brain Mapping
Color Perception
Female
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Neural Pathways - blood supply
Neural Pathways - pathology
Oxygen - blood
Perceptual Disorders - pathology
Phonetics
Regression Analysis
Rest
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Studying cognitive processes underlying synesthesia, a condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality automatically leads to abnormal additional sensory perception, allows insights into the neural mechanisms of normal and abnormal cross-modal sensory processing. Consistent with the notion that synesthesia results from hyperconnectivity, functional connectivity analysis (adopting independent component analysis and seed-based correlation analysis) of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data of 12 grapheme-color synesthetes and 12 nonsynesthetic control subjects revealed, in addition to increased intranetwork connectivity, both a global and a specific (medial and lateral visual networks to a right frontoparietal network) increase of intrinsic internetwork connectivity in grapheme-color synesthesia. Moreover, this increased intrinsic network connectivity reflected the strength of synesthetic experiences. These findings constitute the first direct evidence of increased functional network connectivity in synesthesia. In addition to this significant contribution to the understanding of the neural mechanisms of synesthesia, our results have important general implications. In combination with data derived from clinical populations, our data strongly suggest that altered differences in intrinsic network connectivity are directly related to the phenomenology of human experiences.
ISSN:0270-6474
1529-2401
1529-2401
DOI:10.1523/jneurosci.5401-11.2012