To Some, Lights Are Noisy

Aug. 20, 2008— -- Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have discovered a new form of synesthesia, a rare but benign condition in which some people see the world quite differently than the rest of us. To them, letters or numbers have specific colors and tastes, may have specific shapes, because one sensory perception mysteriously leads to an automatic experience in a second sensory pathway.

Now, it turns out, some synesthetes hear sounds when they see movement or flashes of light.

The discovery took neurologist Melissa Saenz by surprise. She was running a program on her computer in the Caltech Brain Imaging Center when a group of students passed by. The screen on her computer showed bright lights moving rapidly back and forth, and a student asked a question that has precipitated a whole new field of inquiry.

"Out of the blue, one of the students asked, 'Does anyone else hear something when you look at that?'" Saenz said in a telephone interview. None of the others heard anything, because there was no sound associated with the lights.

Saenz interviewed the student at length, and determined that the student did, indeed, have synesthesia. Along with Christof Koch, professor of cognitive and behavioral biology at Caltech, Saenz searched the scientific literature for similar cases, but "no one had published a paper on auditory synesthesia, so it hadn't been reported before," she said.

It didn't take long for Saenz to locate three other people affiliated with Caltech, either students or members of the community, who also have auditory synesthesia. A series of experiments have demonstrated that the condition is quite real, and even somewhat beneficial to the synesthetes.

"They have a slightly enhanced soundtrack in life," she said, and she suspects they are more numerous than had been thought, especially since a new form of the condition has been discovered.

Saenz believes auditory synesthetes have not been known about before because objects that move, and bright flashes of light, often occur with sounds, so it's a little harder to detect. In some cases, she said, synesthetes may realize they are different when they hear sounds where there clearly should be none, like sounds coming from a television set when the audio is turned off.