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The fact that you've started reading this says something about the kind of person you are. Where other people say "I see", you say "show me more". Your thirst for knowledge takes you to places that other people don't even know about. And the Atomic Weapons Establishment could be one of them.

 

As the nation's largest high-tech research, development and production facility, with sole responsibility for maintaining the UK's nuclear deterrent, AWE is an organisation like no other.

 

The sheer scale and complexity of our operations offers you immense challenge and variety in your career - and the support we provide for your development is second to none.

 

Whether you're embarking on a scientific, engineering or business career, we'll equip you with all the tools you need to become an expert in your field: with everything from exposure to live projects to ongoing support for professional qualifications.

 

To find out more and apply, visit www.awe.co.uk or call 0118 982 9009 for a brochure.

 

AWE promotes diversity in employment. We welcome applications from women and men, regardless of disability, sexual orientation, racial or ethnic: origin, or age. Applications from women and ethnic minorities are particularly encouraged. Successful candidates will be selected solely in their ability to carry out the duties of the post. The normal contractual retirement age at AWE is 65. Because of the work associated with these posts, they are subject to special nationality rules and are open only to British citizens. All selected candidates will be required to undergo security clearance.

 

 

 

 

 

 FOR the woman known as AP,

 

everyday language is like a soap opera. Every letter of the alphabet has a distinct human personality. "A is a mother-type, very sensible. I is a little guy, H and G are always fussing over him. M and N are two old ladies who spend all their time together and natter a lot. T is a protective male."

 

AP isn't making it up. She has the neurological condition called synaesthesia, which somehow causes crosstalk in her brain, tingeing the letters of the alphabet with genders and personality types. AP's condition manifests itself in other curious ways too: she sees letters and numbers as coloured, and perceives shapes when she tastes certain flavours. But it is her personification of language that is the most interesting part,

 

 because it simply doesn't fit psychologists'

 

i understanding of synaesthesia.

 

Ever since it was first described scientifically in 1880, synaesthesia has usually been thought of as a purely sensory phenomenon. For some reason, the normal barriers keeping the sensory modalities apart are absent, allowing spectacular crosstalk between sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. Individual synaesthetes have differing experiences - some taste sounds, others smell shapes, see music, feel flavours, or experience any other mingling of senses - but in all cases sensory information entering one channel somehow triggers activity in another.

 

For AP, though, synaesthesia is more than purely sensory, and according to a small but increasingly influential group of scientists, she is far from alone. "We are moving beyond a purely sensory view of synaesthesia," says Julia Simner, a linguistic psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who is one of the leading advocates of the new view. "There is a crossing of the senses, but there is also so much more going on." In particular, Simner and her co-workers argue that synaesthesia can have a significant conceptual element, with sensory fireworks being triggered not only by sights, sounds and smells but also by meaning. In fact, conceptual triggers might be more important than sensory ones. If they are right, psychologists may have to revise their understanding of synaesthesia and its causes. In return, though, they may gain a new window on how the human brain handles concepts, and how it connects them to the real world.

 

Most modern research into synaesthesia starts from the assumption that the condition is purely sensory in nature (see "Synaesthesia basics", page 50). This is a sensible starting point, as many reported cases appear to be so. It has also been a useful line of enquiry, helping to confirm that the condition is genuine as well as shedding light on broader questions such as how the brain integrates information from different senses, and how

 

the developing brain builds walls between them. Even so, some researchers have long suspected that sensory crosstalk is not the whole story, and that the condition involves other elements of cognition as well.

 

For the past 20 years or so this view has been slowly gaining ground among psychologists who study synaesthesia, but more recently it has begun to move into the mainstream. For one thing there are case reports of unusual synaesthetes like AP, whose experiences are hard to explain in purely sensory terms. There is also mounting experimental evidence that is hard to ignore.

 

In 2005, a team led by Vilayanur Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, tested six synaesthetes who had a form of the condition called grapheme-colour synaesthesia. This is a relatively common type of synaesthesia in which letters, numerals and sometimes punctuation marks - collectively known as graphemes - are sensed as coloured. Ramachandran wasn't searching for non-sensory aspects of synaesthesia: he was more interested in peering into the workings of synaesthetic brains. Nevertheless, he found something that was difficult to explain. As part of the experiment, the researchers asked the subjects to search for specific graphemes in a crowded jumble of letters and numbers. Grapheme-colour synaesthetes are usually better at this "crowding" task than non-synaesthetes because they can search for colours as well as shapes. Strangely, not all of the subjects were successful.

 

Why might that be? It turned out that the
synaesthetes in the study fell into two groups.
For one, the letters and numbers actually
appeared in colour on the page, whereas in the
other, colour was present in a more abstract
way, in the mind's eye. Only the first group,
known as "projector" synaesthetes, did well
on the crowding tests; those who saw colours
in their mind's eye were no better than non-
synaesthetes. The team tentatively                    ►

 

501 NewScientist 119 May 2007

f sensation," Simner says. She now believes that synaesthesia is primarily triggered by concepts, particularly linguistic ones. If so, another long-standing belief about synaesthesia may have to be revised.

 

Previous descriptions of synaesthesia have tended to agree that each synaesthete las a unique experience. Synaesthetes can indeed be loosely classified into types - word-asters, music-smellers, letter-colourers and so on - but within these groups there were no apparent rules. Just because one lexical-justatory synaesthete tastes "castanets" as tuna fish it doesn't mean that others do: they might get porridge, or earwax, or nothing at all. There seemed to be as many different kinds of synaesthesia as there were synaesthetes.

 

More recent research says this is not strictly true. Once they started looking at grapheme-colour synaesthetes in detail, researchers began to detect previously unnoticed patterns. The letter o, for example, is very often white; a is usually some shade of red, b is blue or brown, while q and / are often purple 01 pink. These are not hard and fast rules, but they are common enough to allow Simner to draw up a prototype synaesthetic alphabet (see Illustration, left). What could be behind these correspondences? For one thing, Simner's team noticed that common letters tend to be paired with common colours and unusual letters with unusual ones. Other associations reflect the first letter of the colour's name: b is nftpn blue or brown, q is green andy is yellow. This priming effect holds true in other

 

synaesthete

 

see g as yellow - the German word for yellow being ge/b. Even more intriguingly, when Simner asked non-synaesthetes what colour a or b would be if they happened to be a colour, they agreed with the synaesthetic alphabet more often than would be expected by chance (Cognitive Neuropsychology, vol 22, p 1069).

 

Similar commonalities can be found among lexical-gustatory synaesthetes. Words often taste of things they share a speech sound with - "prince" tastes of mint, "forage" of orange, "Roger" of sausages. There are conceptual links too: for example, "blue" often tastes inky and "newspaper" of fried fish.

 

What these patterns suggest, says Simner, is that synaesthesia somehow reflects cognitive mechanisms that we all use when processing linguistic concepts. And that has important implications: it means that by studying synaesthetes, psychologists may be able to decode some of the more opaque rules and concepts that make language work.

 

"It seems like a strange way to study language, but it actually provides this

 

wonderful window into the implicit rules underlying linguistics," says Simner. "Human beings have this hugely sophisticated knowledge of language, even if they can't articulate the knowledge." Studying synaesthetes allows us to glimpse this knowledge first-hand, she says, because they explicitly experience the linguistic concepts that the rest of us only know implicitly.

 

This new field of linguistic synaesthesia is in its infancy, but has already started to shine a light into some dark corners of linguistics. For example, linguists have documented a large number of subtle rules of pronunciation. Take the phoneme /, for example, which has three sounds: a "clear" /, as in the word "like", and two "dark" ones - as in "deal" and "bottle". Linguists are interested to know whether these different sounds are processed differently by the brain. Synaesthetes can provide an answer.

 

For one synaesthete, known as JIW, the / sound triggers three different taste sensations - potatoes, fingernails or Rice Krispies. JIW had no idea why this should be the case, but when Simner analysed his synaesthetic triggers she discovered they exactly matched the linguistic rule. The clear / triggers potatoes, while the two dark ones trigger fingernails and Rice Krispies, respectively. "He had no idea that these

 

different / sounds even existed, but that didn't matter," says Simner. "His brain was automatically distinguishing between the sounds anyway."

 

Another area where synaesthesia has proved useful is with words such as "blackbird" or "tablecloth". Linguists have long debated whether the brain stores these compound words as one concept or two. So Andreas Kubitza, a linguist at the University of Erfurt, asked a German synaesthete to tell him. For this person, words usually trigger a single colour. Kubitza found that compound words triggered two, unless they were very common. So Fahrmann (ferry + man) elicited the two colours usually associated with the words "ferry" and "man" but Bahnhof (train + station) produced just a single colour. What that means, suggests Kubitza, is that compound words are initially

 

stored as two concepts but can be assimilated into one by heavy usage.

 

The new line of research has impressed other synaesthesia researchers. "I think this is striking and elegant work," says Ramachandran. "It demonstrates that you can take this quirky phenomenon into linguistic space and map it out much more precisely, so that you are also learning about how the mind processes language." Simner believes there are many other linguistic questions you can probe with synaesthesia that you can't get at another way. For example, does the brain

 

//

 

handle qu as a single grapheme or two? Does it automatically spell out words as we listen to spoken language, like an internal ticker tape?

 

But perhaps the most important implication is what synaesthesia can tell us about the mysterious inner workings of the human mind. Simner believes that the crosstalk between linguistic concepts and sensory experiences isn't confined to synaesthetes. Instead, she thinks it's a general principle: in some sense the linguistic concepts we carry around in our heads influence the way we perceive the world, and vice versa. If she's right, we're all synaesthetes to some extent. It's just that we haven't noticed yet. •

 

Гоменюсь, шо так аццки страшно, просто не до конца ишшо с файнридером разобралась))