Julia Simner

Julia Claire Simner is a British psychologist and professor of neuropsychology at the University of Sussex. Her research considers how we process sensory information. She is interested in how to support people with sensory differences, including synesthesia, misophonia and aphantasia.

Julia Claire Simner
Alma mater	University of Sussex University of Oxford University of Toronto
Scientific career
Institutions	University of Sussex University of Edinburgh
Thesis	Engaging long and short term memory during anaphor comprehension (2001)

Early life and education

Simner was an undergraduate student in psychology at the University of Oxford. She moved to the University of Toronto for her graduate studies.^[1] Simner researched long and short-term memory during anaphor (i.e.. co-referring expressions) comprehension for her doctorate at the University of Sussex.^[2] She explored how memory is activated when making inferences in language. She demonstrated that when an anaphor is processed, meaning is activated using a long-term linguistic storehouse of words.^[2] She worked as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

Research and career

In 2005 Simner was appointed a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she was promoted to reader in 2010. She moved to the University of Sussex as a professor in 2014.^[1] At Sussex Simner runs the MULTI-SENSE laboratory. Simner studies how special brains process the sensory world. Amongst these special brains, Simner has studied synaesthesia, a neurological condition that links and merges senses.^[3][4] Synaesthesia impacts over 4% of the population.^[3] Simner has developed several strategies to investigate synaesthesia and ways to identify how genuine synaesthetes reports of synaesthesia. For example, people with synaesthesia are consistent in their reports (e.g. the same pairings of trigger and responses) over long periods of time. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of synaesthete's brains reveal bilateral activation in response to words (e.g. their taste centres activate when they hear words).^[5] She has shown that synaesthesia is heritable, that it is linked to the X chromosome, and that it develops after conception.^[5]

Simner has studied synaesthesia amongst children, and showed that 1.3% had grapheme-colour synaesthesia.^[6]

Simner is the science officer for the UK Synaesthesia Association.^[7]

In 2025 she appeared on The Life Scientific with Jim Al-Khalili.^[8]

Select publications

• Julia Simner; Catherine Mulvenna; Noam Sagiv; Elias Tsakanikos; Sarah A Witherby; Christine Fraser; Kirsten Scott; Jamie Ward (1 January 2006). "Synaesthesia: the prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences". Perception. 35 (8): 1024–1033. doi:10.1068/P5469. ISSN 0301-0066. PMID 17076063. Wikidata Q30542080.
• Julia Simner (11 March 2011). "Defining synaesthesia" (PDF). British Journal of Psychology. 103 (1): 1–15. doi:10.1348/000712610X528305. ISSN 0007-1269. PMID 22229768. Wikidata Q22306114.
• Julia Simner; Jamie Ward; Monika Lanz; Ashok Jansari; Krist Noonan; Louise Glover; David A Oakley (1 January 2005). "Non-random associations of graphemes to colours in synaesthetic and non-synaesthetic populations". Cognitive Neuropsychology. 22 (8): 1069–1085. doi:10.1080/02643290500200122. ISSN 0264-3294. PMID 21038290. Wikidata Q34624896.