Julia Simner is a professor of neuropsychology specialising in multisensory processes. In her research she asks three broad questions: How do we process the sensory world? How do special brains do this in special ways (i.e., people with differences in their 5 senses)? And how might we support adults and children with sensory differences? The sensory differences she studies include: synaesthesia (a type of ‘merging of the senses’), misophonia (unusual aversion to everyday sounds like chewing, and tapping), sensory sensitivities (over- or under-responding to the senses), aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery, so a 'blind mind's eye'), dysikonesia (absence of multisensory imagery), and subgroups within autism (notably, savantism and objectophilia). These ostensibly disparate groups are united by the fact they have differences in their 5 senses, accompanied by altered brain structure and function.

Her education and career have taken her to the Universities of Paris-Sorbonne, Oxford, Toronto, Edinburgh and Sussex, and she currently runs the MULTISENSE lab at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on the psychological and neuroscientific bases of sensory differences, and has been published in well-regarded science journals including ‘Brain’ and ‘Nature’, and in over 100 newspaper and media articles worldwide. She is the Science Officer for the UK Synaesthesia Association, and the author of several books (The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia; Synaesthesia: A Very Short Introduction).

contact email: j [dot] simner [at] sussex [dot] ac [dot] uk