SINESTESIA: BASI NEURALI E POSSIBILI VANTAGGI COGNITIVI

Synaesthesia is a neural condition in which stimulation of a sense or concept triggers a second perception not normally associated with the stimulus. In the first part of this paper it is shown that there is not a unique definition of this phenomenon. In fact, despite some of the definitional criteria seem to be shared by scientific community, researchers still disagree about whom to consider a true synaesthete and whom not. Furthermore, several types of synaesthesia are listed, and it is suggested that the differences among them are the result of the integrative and compensatory roles the condition plays in cognitive processes. Studies about prevalence and familiarity show that the percentage of people who have synaesthesia goes from 1 to 5%. In the second part the three main current neurocognitive models of synaesthesia are presented (cross-activation model, disinhibited feedback model, reentrant processing model). Functional and anatomical cerebral measures show that there are evident differences between the brain of synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes. The last part is about the possibility that this phenomenon may provide some kind of benefit in cognitive, and specifically memory and cognitive manipulation of information.