Abstract
Synaesthesia involving haptic perception has been less well documented than other forms of synaesthesia. There are several possibilities why this might be. Firstly, it may well be less common than other types of synaesthesia. Day [1] reports that only 4.0% of synaesthetes report coloured touch and 0.8% report vision-to-touch, compared to 68.8% reporting coloured graphemes (note: these are percentages of synaesthetes, not percentages of general population). A second reason is that researchers don’t always volunteer it. We made a chance discovery of someone who experiences tactile sensations on her own body when watching someone else being touched as a result of an email request about other forms of synaesthesia. We have since found that other synaesthetes have it too but they didn’t report it until prompted because they considered it ‘normal’ (i.e., they assumed everyone else had it).
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Banissy M, Ward J (2007) Mirror-touch synaesthesia is linked to empathy. Nature Neuroscience 10: 815–816
Ramachandran VS, Blakeslee S (1998) Phantoms in the brain. William Morrow, New York
Ward J (2008) The frog who croaked blue: Synesthesia and the mixing of the senses. Routledge, Oxford
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© 2008 Birkhäuser Verlag
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Ward, J., Banissy, M.J., Jonas, C.N. (2008). Haptic perception and synaesthesia. In: Grunwald, M. (eds) Human Haptic Perception: Basics and Applications. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-7612-3_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-7612-3_20
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser Basel
Print ISBN: 978-3-7643-7611-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-7643-7612-3
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