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By Richard Ashcroft, MA, PhD Professor Richard Ashcroft teaches medical law and ethics at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level in the Department of Law at Queen Mary, University of London. Previously, he was Professor of Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine and Dentistry, and before that he worked at Imperial College London, Bristol University and Liverpool University. Professor Ashcroft is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health, funded by the Wellcome Trust, with partners at Kings College London and the London School of Economics.  He is also working on the role of human rights theory, law and practice in bioethics policy, and on ethical challenges in public health. He has a longstanding interest in biomedical research ethics.  I am both someone who writes and teaches on bioethics, and father of a son with autism.  He’s a delightful and happy child and he and I have good lives. But like most parents of children with autism I do wo...

By Guest Contributor Katherine Bryant PhD Candidate, Neuroscience Emory University Who are synesthetes? [Describing the experiences of subject MMo] Eights are yellow, for example, a square feels like mashed potatoes, and the name Steve is somehow like poached eggs. (Cytowic p. 26) “…I [asked the vendor] what kind of ice cream she had.  ‘Fruit ice cream,’ she said.  But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn’t bring myself to buy any ice cream after she’d answered that way…” (Record of patient “S”, Luria p. 82) Colored alphabet, via Wikipedia Commons The unexpected sensory pairings described above are the experiences of a minority of people, perhaps 4% of the population (Simner et al., 2006), known as synesthetes. Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which unusual linkages occur between sensory modalities – sounds may evoke colors, tastes may evoke shapes, or numbers may evoke spatial patterns...