One in Five of Us May 'Hear' Flashes of Light (theguardian.com) 134
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.
Wesley? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Okay, sorry for being pedantic, but if you're referencing a Sicillian and iocaine powder then you're talking about Westley, not Wesley. I know, I know, everyone who watches the movie hears it as Wesley, but that's not correct.
What are you talking about? We all know the exploits of the famous trio Wesley, Indigo, and Andre.
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You have taught me something new today, I thank you. I had no idea the name was Westley.
Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
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I would recognize it anywhere.
Have it all the time... (Score:4, Interesting)
... 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.
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You should have your optometrist check you for posterior vitreous detachment.
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Nope, the CRTs are pure noise. I can hear them operating even with my eyes closed and my back turned to them. I just have a significantly better high-frequency sensitivity than most people. The initial jolt is the electromagnets snapping into place when power is turned on, then the noise of them working is very distinct high frequency sound (for the horizontal deflectors).
May be your high-frequency hearing is not that good but you still perceive the vibrations.
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Um, what? Nothing's moving in your TV, Sparky...
Um, yes it is. Even new TVs contain mechanical relays.
Every molecule is moving, every one. (Score:2)
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.
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My thought exactly - moving wires due to varnish falloff and moving plates in the transformers and coils. It takes just an instant to "snap" to a location where the movement is no longer possible and only vibration takes place afterwards.
It just struck me today - a CRT is like a CERN in your living room. It is much more complex than LED screen. I can still remember operating CRTs with their plastic covers off, so I can use a screw driver to turn the trimming resistors fix brightness, contrast, and individu
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I was just talking about mechanical noise in general, which you can still get from even a new TV when you switch on or off as relays click.
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When I look directly into a bright light, I hear myself sneezing. Does that count, too?
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Yup, same here, although very subtly. Sudden noises cause the impression of a brief flash of light, and hilariously, bright light makes it harder for me to hear things. XD
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Same here. It occurs only when I'm falling asleep, I can see sudden noises. It's always blue, but it goes from light to dark blue: acute sounds are light blue, bass sounds are dark blue. The image always shows at the same place (pointing towards my noise) and has a form that reminds me of a lava lamp.
Raves (Score:5, Funny)
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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You just go to the wrong raves.
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What kind of rave doesn't have some form of flashing light, at least during the night?
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if you couldn't hear the the light and taste colors then you were taking the wrong stuff....
baby toys (Score:4, Interesting)
Not synesthesia-like. (Score:1)
This sounds pretty much like synesthesia outright.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Colored numbers (Score:4, Funny)
and LSD.
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and LSD.
"This shit will make you taste colors."
Hmm, maybe it really will.
The Librarians anyone?? (Score:2)
the character "Cassandra Cillian" has a huge case of this (giving a good excuse for the Math Girl thinking FX)
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didn't you think it was weird that no one else ever mentioned it?
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It's not just synesthesia, other forms of altered perception are easily not noticed by the sufferer. I was 32 before I realised I'm completely face blind! I can recognise someone at a distance by their gait and pose, the sound of their footsteps and voice etc, so it's not like I ever struggled with identifying people I know.
I just assumed everyone else had trouble recognising people after a haircut, or change in clothes style...
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I had a friend in high school who could "see" the color of every note on a piano. You could play a note and he'd tell you not only the note but the exact key you pressed (so the octave, too). He could even pick out all the notes in chords of 5 or 6 notes even if they were disharmonious and tell you the chord name (e.g. "That's a C# minor with an added A two octaves down and a B flat one octave down")
I was soooo jealous. The thing that struck me was that his "colors" were consistent (for instance, C was alwa
Flashbang Fireworks (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I don't like noisy fireworks in general. I like the lights, I don't mind the vibrations, I don't like the sound; never understood why people would enjoy a harsh offensive sound that blasts their eardrums.
Another study? (Score:3)
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.
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Anecdotally, I was driving somewhere, listening to some music and a particular note seemed to have a taste. It was really weird. I have never experienced this before or after (or perhaps just never been consciously aware of it).
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I don't have taste buds in my anus.
New senses? (Score:3)
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.
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Yep, definitely got this (Score:1)
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...
Which City University and 20%? (Score:2)
Except for maybe Hong Kong, I'd suggest that the researcher's data skews towards people who abuse LSD.
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I wrote that wrong (was in a hurry). If you have ever USED LSD, then due to the fact that it is fat soluble, you will one day abuse LSD, entirely by accident. I had meant to make it "have used" not "abuse"
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According to Wikipedia, the half life is 3-5 hours, so your implication that you'll trip on a future occasion doesn't make sense. Citation needed.
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I would not trust Wikipedia for drug facts.
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http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/fyi-can-acid-trip-really-give-you-flashbacks/ [popsci.com]
Roddenberry was right (Score:1)
We would hear the Enterprise in a vacuum
Sometimes... (Score:3)
Sometimes if I'm startled by a sharp noise, I also see a flash of light.
This explains the meteor mystery (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I am one who hears meteors tear through the sky.
It only happens when I actually see them, not for the vast majority of them that go unseen. And happens in both relatively bright ambient lighting (on a porch, in town, with the lights on) or relative darkness (out in the country somewhere).
But I've never noticed an auditory response to other other visual stimuli.
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This is also true for the aurora borealis (northern lights). People report hearing sounds when watching them, but you can analyze the audio from video recordings and see that there is no sound. Or record audio only during an aurora borealis and play it back later: nothing.
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No one questions that there's a lot of noise at the meteor's surface. But that noise is originating sound-minutes away from the observer.
We aren't wondering why there's noise; we're wondering why you hear it simultaneously as you see the meteor, instead of minutes later.
People have a crude form of telepathy. (Score:2)
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 [youtube.com]. 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
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The link I provided was showing the adaptability of our sense perception mechanisms, which underlies mirror-touch synesthesia, which has nothing to do with adapting to tools other than it uses some of the same neural phenomena.
brain crosstalk (Score:3)
Growing a human brain in a human skull causes folds. Folds cause crosstalk. Crosstalk causes synethesia and other personality traits.
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<MORBO>Brains do not work that way!</MORBO>
Summoners War (Score:2)
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".
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I don't recall Yoko claiming she did a rimjob ...
Re:Synesthesia (Score:5, Funny)
When I hear sirens, they're quite often accompanied by flashes of red and blue.
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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.
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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
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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 accom
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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.
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