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  3. That some people make weird associations between the senses has been acknowledged for over a century. The condition has even bee

That some people make weird associations between the senses has been acknowledged for over a century. The condition has even bee

admin2021-09-17  30
问题    That some people make weird associations between the senses has been acknowledged for over a century. The condition has even been given a name: synaesthesia. Odd as it may seem to those not so gifted, synaesthetes insist that spoken sounds and the symbols which represent them give rise to specific colours or that individual musical notes have their own hues.
   
   Yet there may be a little of this cross-modal association in everyone. Most people agree that loud sounds are brighter than soft ones. Likewise, low-pitched sounds are reminiscent of large objects and high-pitched ones evoke smallness. Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence of Oxford University think something similar is true between sound and smell.
   Ms. Crisinel and Dr. Spence wanted to know whether an odour sniffed from a bottle could be linked to a specific pitch. To find out, they asked 30 people to inhale 20 smells. After giving each sample a good sniff, volunteers had to click their way through 52 sounds of varying pitches, and identify which best matched the smell. The results of this study are intriguing.
   The researchers’ first finding was that the volunteers did not think their request utterly ridiculous. It rather made sense, they told them afterwards. The second was that there was significant agreement between volunteers. Sweet and sour smells were rated as higher-pitched, smoky and woody ones as lower-pitched.
   It is not immediately clear why people employ their musical senses in this way to help their assessment of a smell. But gone are the days when science assumed each sense worked in isolation. People live, say Dr. Spence and Ms. Crisinel, in a multisensory world and their brains tirelessly combine information from all sources to make sense, as it were, of what is going on around them.
   Taste, too, seems linked to hearing. Ms. Crisinel and Dr. Spence have previously established that sweet and sour tastes, like smells, are linked to high pitch, while bitter tastes bring lower pitches to mind. Now they have gone further. In a study that will be published later this year they and their colleagues show how altering the pitch and instruments used in background music can alter the way food tastes. Volunteers rated the toffee eaten during low-pitched music as more bitter than that consumed during the high-pitched performance. The toffee was, of course, identical. It was the sound that tasted different.
All of the following associations can be called synaesthesia EXCEPT______.
选项 A、sound and color
B、sound and brightness
C、sound and symbol
D、sound and smell
答案C
解析 推断题。根据题干关键词定位到前两段。C项“声音和象征”并没有在原文中提及，且“象征”与感官无关，因此C项sound and symbol不是通感，为正确答案。
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