One Bite at a Time

Ramachandran studied the neural mechanisms of grapheme-color synesthesia, a condition in which viewing black and white letters or numbers on a page evokes the experience of seeing colors. Ramachandran (with then PhD student, Edward Hubbard) showed that some synesthetes (those who experience synesthesia) were better able to detect “embedded figures” composed of one letter or number (for example a triangle composed of 2s) on a background of another number (for example 5s). This is a difficult task for people who do not experience synesthesia. However, some synesthetes report that the colors they see help them to find and identify the embedded shape. Their performance on behavioral tasks show that some synesthetes are better at this task than non-synesthetes.