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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
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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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.'"
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
I don't have taste buds in my anus.
"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.
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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)
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.
Sometimes if I'm startled by a sharp noise, I also see a flash of light.
if you couldn't hear the the light and taste colors then you were taking the wrong stuff....
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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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.
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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.
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".