Ticker taping: A form of synesthesia

[sue_frantz]

“’You never know if your perception is a normal perception or if it’s a particular perception that differs from other ones,’ says Fabien Hauw, a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist” (Makowski, 2024a).

Many years ago, after I finished a short lecture on synesthesia in Intro Psych, one of my students raised her hand. She said, “I have synesthesia.” She went on to say that she didn’t know it was an unusual thing until a few months earlier when she was standing with a group of friends, and one was talking about this peculiar thing he had just learned about in his (my) Intro Psych course. As he explained that some people see colors when they hear sounds, my current student said, “Doesn’t everyone experience that.” All eyes turned her. No, no, they don’t.

Some number of terms later, I shared with students that sometimes when it’s quiet—most commonly before falling asleep—a sudden noise results in a flash of a light pattern, such as a bright hashtag/pound sign or checkerboard. My (now laughable) mistake was that I assumed this was an experience everyone had. The looks on my students’ faces made it clear that it is not. Interestingly (or not), I haven’t had this experience in at least five years—neither the flash of light nor those looks on my students’ faces.

With that as my mental backdrop, I read with great interest an article in the July/August 2024 issue of Scientific American about ticker tape synesthesia, aka ticker taping (Makowski, 2024b). The article is available freely online (Makowski, 2024a). It’s especially interesting because the writer—a copy editor for Scientific American—has ticker tape synesthesia.

The name ticker tape synesthesia is unfortunate, because to explain what this is to our students we first have explain what a ticker tape is. The Wikipedia article on ticker tape will get your students (and you?) up to speed quickly. We already have to explain what a cocktail party is when describing the cocktail party effect, so we’re used to this sort of problem.

Sir Francis Galton described ticker tape synesthesia in 1883. While he didn’t call it that, he did reference the telegraph technology that made ticker tapes possible:

Some few persons see mentally in print every word that is uttered; they attend to the visual equivalent and not to the sound of the words, and they read them off usually as from a long imaginary strip of paper, such as is unwound from telegraphic instruments. The experiences differ in detail as to size and kind of type, colour of paper, and so forth, but are always the same in the same person (Galton, 1907, p. 67).

In short, ticker tape synesthesia is personal captioning—words that are heard become words that are seen. As a person with this form of synesthesia hears someone speaking—including themselves (Hauw et al., 2023), their brain automatically generates text. Some people describe the text as scrolling across their mind’s eye, like a ticker tape. Others describe it as a few words appearing and then being replaced with the next set of words. Others describe the text as coming out of the mouth of the person who is speaking. What if the person doesn’t know how to spell the word? The word may appear as fuzzy text. What if two people are speaking? There are two streams of text in different locations (Makowski, 2024b).

Some people with ticker tape synesthesia report that the written words may look different depending on context. For example, if the speech they are hearing is particularly emotional, the words may take on a different color, may tremble, or may be larger. Some report that louder voices result in larger words. What about words that are sung? The words may be less visible or may “undulate according to the melody” (Hauw et al., 2023, p. 171). And what about numbers? They typically appear as Arabic numerals rather than written out as words (Hauw et al., 2023). I wonder if someone who is well-versed in APA-style would see numbers one through nine as spelled out rather than as Arabic numerals. And if they would apply the exceptions, such as “6 cm.”  

Research into the underlying brain mechanisms of ticker tape synesthesia is just getting started, but as you might imagine initial results show increased activity between the areas of the brain associated with seeing written words and the areas associated with processing speech (Hauw et al., 2024).

Even though ticker tape synesthesia is currently thought to be rare, I suspect that the more people hear about it, the more people will say, “I experience that. Doesn’t everybody?”

References

Galton, F. (1907). Inquiries into human faculty (2nd ed.). https://galton.org/books/human-faculty/text/galton-1883-human-faculty-v4.pdf

Hauw, F., Béranger, B., & Cohen, L. (2024). Subtitled speech: The neural mechanisms of ticker-tape synaesthesia. Brain, 147(7), 2530–2541. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awae114

Hauw, F., El Soudany, M., & Cohen, L. (2023). Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia. Cortex, 160, 167–179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005

Makowski, E. (2024a, July 1). My synesthesia transforms speech into text I ‘see’ in my head. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/my-synesthesia-transforms-speech-into-text-i-see-in-my-he...

Makowski, E. (2024b, August). Speech transforms into text I “see.” Scientific American, 331(1), 90–92.