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One in Five of Us May 'Hear' Flashes of Light (theguardian.com)
One in five people is affected by a synaesthesia-like phenomenon in which visual movements or flashes of light are "heard" as faint sounds, according to scientists. From a report on The Guardian: The findings suggest that far more people than initially thought experience some form of sensory cross-wiring -- which could explain the appeal of flashing musical baby toys and strobed lighting at raves. Elliot Freeman, a cognitive neuroscientist at City University and the study's lead author, said: "A lot of us go around having senses that we do not even recognise." More florid forms of synaesthesia, in which disparate sensory experiences are blended, are found in only about 2-4% of the population. To a synaesthete, the number seven might appear red, or the name Wesley might "taste" like boiled cabbage, for instance. The latest work -- only the second published on the phenomenon -- suggests that many more of us experience a less intrusive version of the condition in which visual movements or flashes are accompanied by an internal soundtrack of hums, buzzes or swooshes. Since movements are very frequently accompanied by sounds in everyday life, the effect is likely to be barely discernible.
the name Wesley might "taste" like boiled cabbage
I am pretty sure the name Wesley tastes like a nice MLT, where the mutton is nice and lean.
Or perhaps it tastes like iocaine powder if you are a Sicilian.
... but the other way around: when I'm in bed, in the absolute dark, and hear a sudden noise, I see it as a white flash that correlates very strongly with the noise intensity/position. And it's not only when I'm almost sleeping, it's enough just to be in a dark place but I started noticing it when lying in bed. Wonder if that's also common.
No, it's just you
I love when people throw the word loser around like their team just won the superbowl. Get a clue, this is democracy not sports.
I've experienced the opposite; occasionally sounds will cause me to see a burst of blue light.
What's new is how widespread it is RTFS
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
If they think some natural process "could explain the appeal of flashing musical baby toys and strobed lighting at raves", they don't know what's going on at raves.
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I see sudden sounds as flashes of light. I only notice it when my eyes are closed or when it's really dark.
Can be quite annoying when trying to sleep.
IMO this stuff shows up in the headlines because people are desperate to understand it and, while perhaps not "under-studied" this research is absolutely suppressed and kept from the general public. It is a tragic ignorance that has eroded the very foundations of society.
I bet Wil Wheaton does too - boiled rotten cabbage
And no, the glowsticks and crap were not there because we could "hear the light" they were there because we were all high as fuck on halucinogens and glowsticks and lights look neat on that stuff.
That literally is the extent of it.
When I hear sirens, they're quite often accompanied by flashes of red and blue.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I don't recall Yoko claiming she did a rimjob ...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Or maybe it is the flashing musical baby toys that wires brains this way in the first place.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
This sounds pretty much like synesthesia outright.
I see each digit in a different color, and I've always thought that was the way for everyone. Only a few years ago - while reading "Born On A Blue Day" by Daniel Tammet - it occurred to me that this might not be the case.
But I'm sure most people see sounds as they fall asleep. Back in the incandescent lightbulb days, after turning off the light to go to sleep, the ticking sounds of the cooling light fixture would make fireworks show in my mind's eye.
I wonder if this has implications for what kind of fireworks different people like. One of my favorites are the ones that are just a single quick very bright flash of light, followed by the explosion that you can feel as well as hear. My wife hates those.
People with that condition would definitely "hear" something extra with those, moreso than with any other kind of firework. So that particular firework would be a totally different experience than it is for everyone else.
I remember form distant past, hearing a faint hiss coinciding with the lightning arcing wide across the zenith above my head, seconds or perhaps split seconds before the deafening thunder roared down. However, there might be a physical explanation for that, maybe some light speed fast interaction of light or radio waves with surrounding air or vegetation? Or perhaps high frequency component of sound travelled faster through the air?
The tfa suggest it is more common in musicians to hear motion and as someone with a degree in applied music... First I'm not clairvoyant although I can with good accuracy listen to a portion of a melody I've not heard before and complete it so long as it follows with music theory. I would not be surprised if anyone that loves music would be able to do the same to some degree especially if it's a new song from an artist that they listen to a lot.
As far as motion goes yes I can anticipate the sound that accompanies it along with patterns of motion to follow for some things. It has to something I'm familiar with just like a big sports fan is likely to know what the next play in a football game will be.
I don't remember exactly, and maybe someone will remember and have a link handy, but I think there was a recent study (in the past few years) that suggested that mild forms of synaesthesia might be extremely common, and in fact simply part of how human intelligence works.
I think the suggestion was that there are various ways that we connect sense information naturally, and unavoidably. Red is hot. Blue is cold. Red tastes like cherries and green like sour apple. Odd numbers might seem sharp to you, while evens seem rounded. Someone yelling angrily at a certain pitch might conjure the feeling of running your hand the wrong way on a cheese grater. You might feel a tactile sense of pain when hearing finger nails on a chalkboard.
Now someone is going to come forward and point out that many of these things might just be learned associations, which is true. I think the argument was that the ability to make these associations, as well as the ability to form and understand metaphors like "His voice was like rubbing your hand the wrong way on a cheese grater," implies that your brain is already capable of tying different kinds of sensory information together. Visual information can have a sound. Sounds can have colors. Colors can have tastes. What we call "synaesthesia" may just be an amplified version of this very common phenomenon.
I had a titanium implant last year.
For the first few weeks I had this intermittent "metallic taste" sensation at the site of the implant.
It eventually went away.
Anyone else experience this?
Anyone ever hear of such a thing?
If you are in the medical field and want to contact me, reply with your contact info. I'll check back in a day or two.
Elliot Freeman, a cognitive neuroscientist at City University and the study's lead author, said: "A lot of us go around having senses that we do not even recognise."
It seems to me more like a short circuit between regions of the brain than a different sense. I wouldn't like to hear things that aren't there just because I'm seeing things. It's well known that there are substantial interactions between different regions of the brain, which is why for example we turn down the stereo while trying to find an address.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
*You Are*
Tip: if you're going to troll, don't look like a loser whilst doing it.
I hear noises from animated gif's with impacts, explosions and so on, even machines clatter and clunk. I also get a ghost pain impression when seeing someone get hurt. I'm weird, I know, but maybe not quite as weird as I thought before...
That's funny, when I see flashing red and blue lights I often hear people screaming in terror as I drive through the farmer's market.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Except for maybe Hong Kong, I'd suggest that the researcher's data skews towards people who abuse LSD.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I get that, too. Loud noise = white flash. I always assumed it was just my brain being so startled by the noise it stopped paying attention to visual input for a second. That's gotta be a poor survival instinct.
I've noticed at art museums, as I stand and look at a paining, I often hear a kind of mild background hum, that seems to change depending on what work I'm looking at. I can tell it's in my head and don't think I'm intentionally doing it. Possibly it's something I notice there because art museums are kind of quiet places.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
This likely has a relationship to PTSD and the "Radar O'Reilly effect" where those whose lives depended on the choppers hear them long before the average person, even after hearing loss. The best description of why that I had up to now was "they are actively if unconsciously listening". This allows them to take visual cues and feed them into audio, and audio cues and feed them into visual processing.
I would imagine that for prey of predators whose behavior is periodic in time, or whose cues are acoustic, a predator-specific synesthesia is a survival trait. This could bleed into human neuro-biology and relate to triggering and susceptibility for PTSD sufferers. This also leads to both potential ways to gaslight victims (don't do evil) and potential ways to remove non-obvious but strong triggers. Headphones or sunglasses that can filter the triggering phenomena, acoustic and visual respectively, could be an empowering and effective mitigant for PTSD sufferers.
Likely indicators for acoustic triggering might be self-medication with acoustics by not liking places with acoustic signatures, or by preferring other places with a different acoustic signature. This seems like an interesting additional dimension to music therapy.
-EngrStudent
We would hear the Enterprise in a vacuum
the character "Cassandra Cillian" has a huge case of this (giving a good excuse for the Math Girl thinking FX)
Why was this voted -1? The media is always running a story about Trump at any given moment. If hearing Trump's name makes him taste shit, then he will literally always be tasting shit.
This place is really going downhill, can people here not deduce simple logic?
Well, sound to me has a shape. When I hear sounds, I see something between an oscilloscope, frequency graph and something I could best describe as contrast function based on tempo, pitch and special orientation.
Which is perhaps not at all that surprising. There are animals who "see" with active sonar, who is to say we don't have some genes that encode a rudimentary passive one. I am not claiming to be able to make any sense of it, but I can attribute a geometric shape to a sound, especially classical music.
...in color.
Many who live north of 60 do hear the aurora. Not just a faint crackling as reported here. This finding does indicate something which I have always suspected, that it is also part of the wiring in some humans.
However it seems that there are also some real sounds created by the aurora which is very hard to explain considering they are created above the atmosphere. Is it also possible that very faint sounds along with light can stimulate the mind to create this effect. Could this be an important factor in individuals that have more of a leaning toward being musical in response to other stimuli? Perhaps this is the reason why people who like to sing about the things we see or feel and are usually considered nut jobs because they have a greater tendency to create sounds in response to stimuli than so called normal people.
I always did hear the Northern Lights and am a musician and a composer. I always thought that I was wired for sound differently than others, now it seems that part of what stirs some of us could very well be influenced greatly by responses to what we see.
Sometimes if I'm startled by a sharp noise, I also see a flash of light.
I have the same with sound. But also with smell.
I put smells in different parts of the frequency spectrum. Citrus are high frequency, nuts and woods are low frequency, etc.
When people see a bright meteor in the night sky, especially a fireball that leaves a glowing trail, it's pretty common for them to report that it was accompanied by a simultaneous sound of some sort, often a crackling noise. Those reports are frequent enough that we can't just dismiss them out of hand but no one has been able to propose a satisfactory explanation from a physics standpoint. If synaesthesia is actually common that would probably explain what's going on.
Not actual radio-like telepathy like in sci-fi stories, but an inbuilt capacity to actually experience what our brains think other people are experiencing.
One of the classic experiments like this is to get a subject wearing goggles to identify with a mannequin. Of course this is artificially induced; we didn't evolve in a world with 3D goggles and cameras. But there is a condition called "mirror-touch synesthesia" in which this occurs naturally, in which people spontaneously experience what someone else is experiencing.
The parallel element I see is the brain somehow generates a sensation without an appropriate physical input, and the phenomenon of mirror touch synesthesia suggests to me this isn't just a curious bug in our brain architecture. The 1.6% of people who report spontaneous mirror synesthesia also score higher than the general population on measures of empathy. I suspect it may also be linked in some way to our ability to learn by copying what others do.
This is a really exciting time in neuroscience, and synesthesia seems like an interesting target for DIY brain hackers. Mirror-type synesthesia particularly so because it's easy to induce. The rubber hand illusion is probably the easiest dramatic effect to produce at home.
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Wesley Crusher stanks like boiled cabbage.
"...version of the condition in which visual movements or flashes are accompanied by an internal soundtrack of hums, buzzes or swooshes..."
Interestingly this phenomenon wasn't seen at all as little as 40 years ago. First examples in humans were dated from May 25, 1977
You just don't know what kind of explosive diarrhea it's going to be.
I've only experienced a synesthesia-like effect twice, so it was very memorable. OTOH, I've always been annoyed by them coloring the election maps the way they do. The blue and red should be reversed! I always thought "republican" was a "dense" word, and dark blue is a "dense" color. Likewise, "democrat" is a light, airy word and red with its connotations of fire seems more appropriate. Other political parties have no color. Anarchists may claim black/red color schemes, but anarchy has no color to me.
I don't experience a sound with light flashes so much as the sudden absence of sound- you know that odd feeling when the heating blower fan turns off and suddenly the room is silent, and a moment before you didn't even realize there was noise? I experience that when there's a bright flash. If you're familiar with the term, it's exactly like when the automatic gain control on a radio kicks in after a static crash. I've noticed video games intentionally parrot the effect- I don't mean as in "Saving Private Ryan" where it's used to simulate temporary hearing loss from an explosion, I mean that they dip the volume to emphasize the flash or whatever it was. I thought it was normal?
Not a lot of CRT's left around to demonstrate this to people though.
It's not just the horizontal and vertical deflection coils, the flyback transformer can be quite noisy.
As these things age the varnish binding the coils can deteriorate allowing movement.
The plates in the flyback transformer can suffer a similar fate.
Hmmmmm.
No brain, no pain.
Growing a human brain in a human skull causes folds. Folds cause crosstalk. Crosstalk causes synethesia and other personality traits.
I love how I got modded "Redundant". The irony is that was part of the point of my post is that this "news" itself is redundant and nothing new if anyone could be bothered to do real research. And of course, that flew right over someone's head and instead they got butt-hurt over it and resorted to retaliatory modding of my post. Very mature! I've been familiar with this subject matter for 15 years.
We'll make great pets
The type I have is that scents have color and texture. So I can describe a smell as dark red and dusty, or smooth and bright blue. I also sense them as sharp or dull or somewhere in between.
I've never met anyone else who has this particular type of synesthesia and it's hard to explain.
Doesn't anyone see what I see?
"Trump taste like... (-1, Troll)"
How does Troll taste? Like chicken?
I play a mobile game called summoners war. In that game, a critical hit causes the image on the screen move/shrink in a way that I hear as a "thump".