Find Out If You Can Hear What I See

Synesthesia is the psychological phenomenon where senses are “cross-
activated.” One might experience a color with alphabetical letters or taste a musical note. One person out of every
thousand is thought to have synesthesia, and some researchers believe babies are born with it. Now there’s a new finding.

During an experiment at the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, a group of students happened to pass by researcher Melissa Saenz’s computer screen video of moving dots. One of the students asked, “Does anyone else hear something when you look at that?” Realizing that the student’s experience had all the characteristics of synesthesia, Saenz began a search of the synesthesia literature to discover that this type, hearing sound when seeing movement, had never been reported. After finding three more auditory synesthetes, she realized her dot video was synesthetically “loud.” When she asked if it made a sound, one of the synesthetes responded, “How could it not?” This answer may signal 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.

To see (or hear) if you have auditory synesthesia, go to klab.caltech.edu/~saenz/movingdots.html