Can you "hear" flashes of light? Do you have synesthesia? Take a test

[anon50609448]

@Richard_Kirk

I suspect the obvious action sequences are a control in this experiment. The sounds I heard (if I heard them) were mostly the ones I expected to hear, which is not the random pairing of synesthesia. My exception was the two sequences of light dots against the dark background: those had a noise. This may be what they are looking for.

That would make a lot of sense to me, and maybe help explain why there were so many videos. I just intuitively felt like my adding-a-sound-track wasn’t really what they were testing for - that’s not synesthesia, it’s just imagination. Because I’m prone to “hearing voices”, I feel like it was easy for me to identify those sounds as a familiar “hearing voices” experience, and know it was coming from a part of my brain well outside the visual/auditory processing parts.

[Richard_Kirk]

BTW: the rotating sphere of dots was unusually silent for me. Can you have synesthetic silence?

[anon50609448]

I have to think you can. I think we experience silence as a thing rather than as an absence.

[Gyrofrog]

Relevant:

(first couple of minutes or so)

[anon68952647]

I scored a lot of ones and zeroes, but i could hear the fireworks and one other.

[jerwin]

ZERO
ZERO
ZERO
ZERO
Oh god, when is this test going to be over…

…
ZERO
ZERO
ZERO
Gotta be over soon
ZERO
ZERO
ZERO
Finally…

Do you consider yourself to be a synesthete?
Where’s the NO option?

I guess I know where things stand.

[Richard_Kirk]

@Blaze_Curry

I actually “hear” a blip in my tinnitus after each flash. It’s really weird that I never noticed it before; perhaps it’s some tiny muscle flexing in response?

I “hear” ‘Fissssshhhhhh’ on the flash. This is a bit weird because I know that flashbulbs had a distinctive ‘pop’. Go figure.

[marence]

@telecinese

My brain usually makes up a faint soundtrack … Doesn’t everyone do that?

Until just recently, I thought everyone had a soundtrack in their brain, to accompany the movie they see thru the camera of their eyes. In my brain, this is somehow separate from the “real” stuff I see and hear (& feel) in everyday life.

Apparently, many don’t. (Insert scene of late-night post-gig talk over food and one more for the road, with me being dumbfounded as everyone gives me the “are you crazy?” look with accompanying wah-wah-wah sad mocking trumpet notes.) But as I just realized again, I do, all the time, even when replaying an embarrassing scene from my life.

I know my imagination is why I “heard” the click-clack and whoosh of the roller-coaster, and the entire smash and tinkle of the glass in the sledgehammer to monitor clip. I “heard” nothing in dots or sparkles, but the bang of the hammer and the flash of the lights made the electrical noise I hear in the room jump loudly and hurt my head. I figure it’s not synesthesia, just the way my head works.