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UCL in the News: Ouch, I saw that
17 June 2007
'Mirror touch' synaesthesia is a strange but real condition, and it might be wide-spread, psychologists have found.
Synaesthesia refers to the merging of senses that are normally experienced separately: 'seeing' music, for example, or experiencing different colours as tastes. Dr Jamie Ward [UCL Psychology] coined the term mirror-touch synaesthesia to describe a different type of sensory mix-up - when people confuse the brain's signal for sensing touch with the 'mirror system' signal that is triggered when watching others being touched. …
"We first came across the mirror-touch synaesthesia by chance," says Ward. The sensation of touch was being discussed at a UCL neuroscience seminar, and someone suggested, as a thought experiment, imagining that people felt what they saw. A colleague of Ward's objected, vigorously insisting that everyone does, in fact, feel what they see. …
When he started to look for people who experience mirror-touch synaesthesia, he had little trouble finding them, he says. …
To make sure that the condition was real, Ward and his student Michael Banissy took a closer look at ten such people. The subjects were touched in different places on their own body, while watching another person's body being touched at the same time, either in the same or a different place to their own. …
Compared to controls, mirror-touch synaesthetes were faster to detect actual touch when it was applied to the same bodily location as the observed touch. They were also more likely to mistake observed touch for real touch. "These are the types of error one would expect if the synaesthetes really are feeling the touches they see," says Ward. …
A standard psychological questionnaire administered by Ward confirms that mirror-touch synaesthetes have more emotional empathy than normal. This results supports the notion that we empathize with others by automatically simulating other people's experience, he says. …
Alison Abbott, 'Nature'
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