Scientists believe that this unusual property will help understand how the human brain processes visual information
Some people can "hear" movement - they hear sounds when they observe moving objects or flashes, even if it happens completely silently, American scientists Melissa Saenz and Christoph Koch from the California Institute of Technology found out, according to RIA Novosti.
Scientists believe that this unusual property will help understand how the human brain processes visual information.
Saenz discovered this effect entirely by accident.
“I was doing an experiment at the Center for Brain Imaging in Caltech when a group of students came on a field trip and I volunteered to explain to them what I was doing,” says Saenz, quoted in the institute's statement.
On the screen of one of the computers in the lab, there was an image of moving dots, similar to the opening footage of Star Wars.
“Suddenly one of the students asked, 'Does anyone else hear something when they look at them?' After talking with him, I realized that his sensations have all the signs of synesthesia, when, when one senses are excited, others are automatically activated. He had this feeling all his life,”says Saenz.
Synesthesia - a feature of perception when, when one sense organ is irritated, a person experiences sensations corresponding to another sense organ - has been known for a long time. Synesthetes can, for example, sense that numbers or letters have a color or taste, see colors when they hear music. This phenomenon is associated with the penetration of nerve impulses into the brain center of the "alien" sense organ.
Saenz studied all the literature on synesthesia and found that auditory synesthesia - in any form - had never been described before. Intrigued by this, the researcher began looking for other people with this ability, using a specially prepared video as a test.
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The video was noisy enough for synesthetes and was a great test tool. One of the subjects, whom she asked if he hears a sound, was very surprised: "How could it be otherwise?"
“I interviewed several hundred people and found three more,” she says.
People with auditory synesthesia hear sounds - tapping, buzzing, when they look at something moving or sparkling. At the same time, everyone whom Saens managed to find was absolutely healthy and did not have any physical abnormalities associated with the senses.
Saenz notes that it is possible that cases of auditory synesthesia have not previously been detected precisely because often moving objects do make sounds.
“People with auditory synesthesia, unlike other synesthetes, may simply not be aware that their sensations are unusual. These people are more likely to have a 'extended soundtrack' rather than an extremely unusual perception, as in other cases,”she says.
Saenz and her colleague Christoph Koch have conducted a series of experiments involving auditory synesthetes, the results of which are published in the journal Current Biology.
The test results showed that auditory synesthetes perceive rhythm with the help of sight much better - they are helped by the sounding sound "in their head".
“Synesthetes have the advantage of not only seeing, but hearing light rhythmic sequences,” says Saenz.
Scientists believe that auditory synesthesia may be a reflection of normal visual information processing in the brain - nerve impulses received from the eyes travel through the cortex responsible for auditory perception, which leads to the appearance of auditory sensations in synesthetes.
To test these assumptions, they began a series of experiments with brain imaging of synesthetes and ordinary people.
