These people see the subtitles. In real life

What is synesthesia?

Synesthesia is a phenomenon of mixing the senses that can manifest itself in various ways. For example, some people see letters in colors (specific letters are assigned to a specific color), and elsewhere, people with synesthesia can associate sounds with colors, which is why they may have, for example, perfect musical hearing. These are the simplest and most common forms of synesthesia, but there are many more.

One of the rarer, but very fascinating varieties of synesthesia is the so-called “ticker-tape synesthesia” (there is no equivalent in Polish, but roughly refers to information strips or printed tapes). It is characterized by the fact that some people visualize frames with inscriptions or something like comic book dialogue bubbles when other people open their mouths and speak.

People talk and I see the subtitles

“When we talk – all your words appear as if written before my eyes” – revealed 73-year-old Francois Le Chevalier in a Zoom interview with the Guardian. “Sometimes, when I read some words, I see them written by hand, and elsewhere I see typewritten writing and sometimes bold fonts.“- he added.

Professor of psychology at the University of Bergen, Mark Price explains that some people’s minds mimic the physical process of writing words, and some people may see words in front of their eyes as they type on their phone or computer.

Moreover, the process of word visualization is not limited only to real linguistic messages, but also to pseudowords and onomatopoeia. For example, neuroscientist and cognitive specialist Fabien Hauw of the Paris Brain Institute notes that people with this type of synesthesia can imagine someone’s laughter as the letters “haha.” For others, when, for example, a cat meows, they will see the word “meow” in front of their eyes.

Interestingly, when Francois Le Chevalier, mentioned earlier, was learning Chinese 10 years earlier, he noticed that when he pronounced words, their phonetic transcription appeared in his mind’s eye. It was very distracting to him, and when he shared it with his friend, he was surprised that not everyone saw the world that way. For him it was an automatic process, similar to dictation.

When the Guardian asked Le Chevalier whether he doesn’t feel overwhelmed by his “gift”, he compared it to a situation at a party, when you have to mentally tune out the conversations in the background to focus on the one currently being conducted. When Le Chevalier watches movies, he sometimes feels confused because his brain sees subtitles based on the spoken language in addition to those actually appearing on the screen.

The so-called ticker-tape synesthesia is a phenomenon discovered relatively recently. Laurent Cohen, a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institut working with Fabien Hauw, came across them about 20 years ago. He heard from one patient that his mother saw letters written next to people’s mouths when they spoke – she kept it a secret for decades and was ridiculed for it, and only shared it with her son in her 90s.

Where does this come from?

It was this situation that led Cohen to investigate what was contributing to this phenomenon. Cohen, Hauw and several other scientists used images obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. They noticed that patients experiencing this phenomenon were characterized by hyperactivity in two areas of the brain. These were left lateral sulcus of the brain responsible for speech processing and the area of ​​the visual form of words, which plays a key role in reading. Cohen notes that among synesthetes there is an increased degree of connection between these two brain regions.

Why does this phenomenon occur? Opinions are divided here – some research suggests that in most people, certain neural connections simply disappear with age, which would improve brain performance. On the other hand another theory is that synesthetes have less inhibition in these brain areas than other peopleand thus communicate with each other more freely.