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Elliot Freeman was a student when he first noticed something strange. Looking out into the dark one evening he spotted a distant lighthouse flashing a Morse code signal. “Every time I saw the flash I heard a distinct buzzing sound,” he says. None of his friends could hear anything. “I thought ‘yeah, that’s kind of odd’. I should look into that some time.”
It turns out Freeman is not alone. He is one of a group of people who experience a strange phenomenon called visually-evoked auditory response (vEAR): they hear noises when they see certain silent moving images. Now he has carried out the biggest study of the condition so far and found that as many as one fifth of us might experience this too.
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This could explain the popularity of a Reddit page dedicated to GIFs that give some people the sensation of sound. The noisyGIFs subreddit has almost 100,000 subscribers, and last year an animated GIF of three electricity pylons playing jump rope became a viral hit on Twitter. Many people said they could hear a sound when the jumping pylon landed. “It raised everyone’s awareness above a threshold where it was taken more seriously,” says Freeman. “People were suddenly aware of it.”
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Does anyone in visual perception know why you can hear this gif? pic.twitter.com/mcT22Lzfkp
— Lisa DeBruine ️ (@lisadebruine) December 2, 2017
Freeman, who is now a psychologist at City University of London, worked with his colleague Christopher Fassnidge to recruit people to an online survey that tests for vEAR (you can take the test here). The test involved questions about synaesthesia, and watching 24 silent videos and rating them for vEAR sounds.
Around 22 per cent of the 4000 people who did the survey rated more than half the videos as stimulating clear and noticeable sound responses. This seems to agree with much smaller previous studies by other researchers, which have found that about 20 per cent of people experience this phenomenon.
Further work with 1000 of the survey respondents revealed that people who experience vEAR are more likely to feel the reverse effect too: they see flashes of light in the dark when they hear certain noises. They were also more likely to get earworms – songs that get stuck in your head.
Most of the people who experience vEAR were more likely to get it when it was easy to imagine an accompanying sound – such as a hammer hitting a nail, or a screaming face. But a smaller group of people seemed to experience vEAR as a direct response to motion and movements within a GIF, including in more abstract, changing patterns.
The results add to the debate about this and other types of synaesthesia: does it come from unusual connections in the brain, or is it the result of heightened brain activity? Freeman speculates that some people may have more crosstalk between the auditory and visual parts of the brain, but that this is more actively suppressed in others.
He is now experimenting with brain stimulation, to see if he can remove the inhibition of this crosstalk. He says that this technique can let people experience vEAR who do not normally, but that it has little effect on people who already experience the phenomenon.
Melissa Saenz, at Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland, was one of the first people to study vEAR. She says Freeman’s survey suggests that the condition is on a spectrum, with some people experiencing more cross-talk between sensory brain areas than others. “It’s important for people who experience this phenomenon it to understand that it’s not all that unusual,” she adds. “It’s often reassuring to know that!”
Journal reference: Cortex, DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2018.02.019
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