Instead, "there were 37 candidate variants," or possible gene variations, he said.īecause the study included only a small number of people, there wasn't enough data to single out the specific genes, of the 37 possibilities, that played a role in synesthesia. Then, to identify genes that might be responsible for the condition, the scientists compared the genes of family members with synesthesia to the genes of family members without it, he said.īut the findings didn't yield a straightforward result: "There was not a single gene that could explain synesthesia in all three families," Fisher said. The scientists used DNA sequencing to study the participants' genes, Fisher said. However, different members of a single family can see different colors when hearing the same sound, Fisher said. Typically, a specific sound or musical tone is consistently associated with a specific color for people who have this type of synesthesia. They chose three families, in which multiple members across at least three generations had a specific type of synesthesia, the so-called sound-color synesthesia, meaning that hearing sounds evokes perceptions of colors. Synesthesia frequently runs in families, so the researchers decided to look for genes that might be responsible for the development of the condition. The question, however, was what causes this different brain wiring, he said. Indeed, the brains of people with synesthesia previously have been shown to be more connected across different regions than the brains of people whose senses are not cross-linked, Fisher told Live Science. (Not all people with the condition "hear" sights, however the condition can also link other senses.) For example, when people with synesthesia "hear" color, brain scans show that there's activity in the parts of the brain linked to both sight and sound, he said. Previous "studies of brain function using magnetic resonance imaging confirm that synesthesia is a real biological phenomenon," said senior study author Simon Fisher, director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.
The study, published today (March 5) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers insight into what might be happening in the brains of people with synesthesia.
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