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Caltech neurobiologists discover individuals who 'hear' movement
Date:8/6/2008

ver been reported. Intrigued, Saenz began to look for other individuals with the same ability, using the original movie seen by the student as a test. "I queried a few hundred people and three more individuals turned up," she says. Having that specific example made it easy to find more people. That movie just happens to be quite "noisy" to the synesthetes and was a great screening tool. When asked if it made a sound, one of the individuals responded, "how could it not?" I would have been less successful had I just generally asked, "Do you hear sounds when you see things move or flash?" because in the real environment, things that move often really do make a sound," for example, a buzzing bee.

This may be why auditory synesthesia hadn't been detected by neurobiologists. "People with auditory synesthesia may be even less likely than people with other synesthetic associations to fully realize that their experience is unusual. These individuals have an enhanced soundtrack in life, rather than a dramatically different experience, compared to others," says Saenz. However, when asked, all of the synesthetes could name examples of daily visual events that caused sounds that they logically knew to be only in their minds, such as seeing a fluttering butterfly or watching television with the sound turned off.

Saenz and Koch found that the four synesthetes outperformed a group of nonsynesthetes on a simple test involving rhythmic patterns of flashes similar to visual Morse code. Normally, such patterns are easier to identify with sound (beeps) than with vision (flashes), so the researchers predicted that synesthetes would have an advantage with visual patterns because they actually heard a sound every time they saw a flash.

In the test, the subjects saw a series of flashes and had to guess if a second sequence, played afterward, represented the same temporal pattern or not. As a baseline measuremen
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Contact: Kathy Svitil
ksvitil@caltech.edu
626-395-8022
California Institute of Technology
Source:Eurekalert

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