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Social responsiveness to inanimate entities: altered white matter in a ‘social synaesthesia’

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posted on 2023-06-09, 03:30 authored by Julia SimnerJulia Simner, M K Rehme, D A Carmichael, M E Bastin, E Sprooten, A M McIntosh, S M Lawrie, M Zedler
Judgments about personalities and social traits can be made by relatively brief exposure to animate living things. Here we show that unusual architecture in the microstructure of the human brain is related to atypical mental projections of personality and social structure onto things that are neither living nor animate. Our participants experience automatic, life-long and consistent crossmodal associations between language sequences (e.g., letters, numbers and days) and complex personifications (e.g., A is a businessman; 7 a good-natured woman). Participants with this ‘Ordinal Linguistic Personification’ (Simner and Hubbard, 2006) which we describe here as a form of social synaesthesia, showed lower fractional anisotropy (FA) values in five clusters at whole-brain significance, compared with non-synaesthetes (in the pre-postcentral gyrus/dorsal corticospinal tract, left superior corona radiata, and the genu, body and left side of the corpus callosum). We found no regions of the brain with increased FA in synaesthetes. A number of these regions with reduced FA play a role in social responsiveness, and our study is the first to show that unusual differences in white matter microstructure in these regions is associated with compelling feelings of social cohesion and personality towards non-animate entities. We show too that altered patterns of connectivity known to typify synaesthesia are not limited to variants involving a ‘merging of the senses’, but also extend to what might be thought of as a cogno-social variant of synaesthesia, linking language and personality attributes in this surprising way.

Funding

MULTISENSE:Lifespan Development of Typical & Atypical Multisensory Perception; G1568; EUROPEAN UNION; 617678

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Neuropsychologia

ISSN

0028-3932

Publisher

Elsevier

Volume

91

Page range

282-289

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Synaesthesia Research Group Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-10-13

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-08-20

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-10-13

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