More than 20% of people can "hear" light signals such as flashes, neuroscientists from the University of London and King's College London said. They published their research in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.
Roughly one-fifth of the population has experienced something akin to synesthesia, a phenomenon in which a sensory signal of one kind gives an automatic response in the form of sensations of another kind. For example, numbers or letters acquire a certain color, and moving objects "sound" even if they move completely silently. The authors of the study drew attention to the ability to perceive flashes of light by ear, as if they were accompanied by sounds.
In the study, 40 participants were presented with visual (flash) or audio messages like Morse code and asked if the messages were the same. They were also asked if they heard any sounds at the same time as the flashes. 22% of the respondents answered that they heard such sounds, the same people performed the task itself better. It also turned out that among professional musicians the proportion of synesthetics is higher, although it is unclear whether their occupation is a consequence or the cause of the development of synesthesia.
“Many of us get sensations that we don't even recognize,” says one of the study's authors, a neuroscientist at the University of London, Elliot Freeman.
