Neurophysiological investigation of idiopathic acquired auditory-visual synesthesia

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Pegah Afra1, Jeffrey Anderson, Michael Funke

  • 1Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84132, USA. pegah.afra@hsc.utah.edu

Neurocase
|November 9, 2011
PubMed

We present a case of acquired auditory-visual synesthesia and its neurophysiological investigation in a healthy 42-year-old woman. She started experiencing persistent positive and intermittent negative visual phenomena at age 37 followed by auditory-visual synesthesia. Her neurophysiological investigation included video-EEG, fMRI, and MEG. Auditory stimuli (700 Hz, 50 ms duration, 0.5 s ISI) were presented binaurally at 60 db above the hearing threshold in a dark room. The patient had bilateral symmetrical auditory-evoked neuromagnetic responses followed by an occipital-evoked field 16.3 ms later. The activation of occipital cortex following auditory stimuli may represent recruitment of existing cross-modal sensory pathways.

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