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Emotional synesthesia is a condition in which specific sensory stimuli are consistently and involuntarily associated with emotional responses.1 There is a very small number of reports of subjects with these stereotyped emotion-sensation pairings. One report described a subject in whom tactile stimulation from different textures (e.g., denim) elicited affective experiences (e.g., feelings of depression).2 Others have described emotional synesthetic associations to grapheme-color perceptions3 and to written names of acquaintances.1 Because there is such a small amount of literature, all in normal subjects with long histories of synesthesia, the neural substrates are unknown. There is a single report of acquired synesthesia: a tingling sensation elicited by sounds, but without emotional synesthesia, after a thalamic infarction.4 We report on the only known case of acquired emotional synesthesia after a focal thalamic lesion, providing a possible window into the neural substrate of this condition.
Footnotes
Author contributions: Dr. Schweizer: study concept and design, analysis and interpretation, writing of manuscript. Mr. Li: acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation. Dr. Fischer: critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content. Dr. Alexander: study concept and design, critical revisions. Dr. Smith: critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content. Dr. Graham: acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation. Dr. Fornazzari: critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content.
Study funding: No targeted funding reported.
Disclosure: The authors report no disclosures relevant to the manuscript. Go to Neurology.org for full disclosures.
Received October 24, 2012. Accepted in final form March 27, 2013.
- Received October 24, 2012.
- Accepted in final form March 27, 2013.
- © 2013 American Academy of Neurology
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