Peter Weiss-Blankenhorn: Functional and structural imaging insights into the neural basis of synaesthesia

Neuroaesthetics | Symposium


Symposium im ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie,
22.-24. November 2012
In Kooperation und mit Unterstützung der Gemeinnützigen
Hertie-Stiftung.


In my talk I will review the structural and functional imaging
studies on
synaesthesia. Since many imaging studies have focused on
grapheme-colour
synaesthesia, the emphasis of my talk will reflect this, and so I
will give a summary
of the current knowledge about structural and functional brain
differences in
grapheme-colour synaesthetes in particular. Moreover, I will
examine how
these structural and functional imaging results might inform
current theories
about the neural mechanisms of synaesthesia.
Initially, functional imaging studies concentrated on the
phenomenology
of synaesthetic experiences: activation of colour-processing
areas in the brain
confirmed the “perceptual reality” of these experiences. Further
studies ex-
plored the neural correlate of individual differences in
synaesthesia with the
help of functional imaging. Recently, modern network analysis
methods have
been applied in the field of synaesthesia to assess the neural
network
architecture during rest and task performance in grapheme-colour
synaesthetes.
These advances in functional imaging were paralleled by studies
using
structural imaging methods, like voxel-based morphometry (VBM)
and
diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to explore grey and white matter
differences in
synaesthesia, respectively.
Finally, I will also provide a critical discussion of the kinds
of limitations
found in previous approaches to studying synaesthetic brain
differences, and I
discuss future perspectives and challenges that structural and
functional
neuroimaging research in synaesthesia will face.


Prof. Dr. Peter Weiss-Blankenhorn studied medicine at the
Heinrich-Heine-
University Düsseldorf. After research projects on Parkinson’s
disease in
Arizona, USA, and on apraxia in Lyon, France, he was trained in
neurology at the
University Hospitals in Düsseldorf and Aachen, Germany. As a
board-certified
neurologist he works in the Institute of Neuroscience and
Medicine (INM-3)
of the Research Centre Jülich (FZJ), Germany, leading the group
“Motor Cognition”.
Since 2010, he is also professor of cognitive neurology at the
University
of Cologne, Germany. In addition to synaesthesia, his scientific
interests in the area of cognitive neurology are focused on the
neural basis of cognitive deficits after stroke using structural
and functional imaging. This translational research aims at the
development of new, innovative therapies for neurorehabilitation.