Lexical Gustatory Synaesthesia

1 of my daughters has this interesting talent, if that's what you'd call it, : To her all names or numbers she hears has an associated food taste and smell. (For instance, pick a random name.... Sarah - to my daughter, smells of carrot and corriander soup and tastes of dried apricots. Another..., Christopher - smells of butter and tastes of tomatoes. By chance listening to weekend radio there was a programme about just such a phenomenon and as everything does, it has a name - Synaesthesia. The dictionary describes it as a mixing up in the brain of our 5 senses " a sensation produced in a part of the body by simulation of another part." Obviously i'd never heard of it before but got to thinking it would make an interesting subject to do a bit of research or a dissertation topic for a culinary arts, food science or even a hospitality student, from a number of different angels.
So just out of curiousity i went to Web of Science , did a search for synaesthesis - back came 303 references to journal articles. Then added in the word taste as well and that brings back 19. And curiously 1 of the 1st articles i look at describes work that Heston Blumenthal (no stranger to this blog) is doing about tasting words and how we could develop a new food language. Then off i go to Science Direct, try the same searches and it brings up 1220 and 145 respectively. And remember a lot of these are full text journal articles. And then to change the focus somewhat, did the same search inPsychInfo and that came back with 269 and 19 respectively for the same searches.

There - i've basically researched and written someones dissertation for them