22% of people can hear this gif… Can you?

Before I begin to describe the next form of synesthesia, I would like you to look at each of these gifs and think about what senses are activated.

According to a recent study (Guttman), around 22% of people experience sound with these gifs. Yet, these gifs are completely silent. While these ones specifically have gone viral for producing the effect, it works with any motion gif. Just google some examples and see how many of them give you an involuntary sense of sound!

Although grapheme-color synesthesia is often cited as being the most common form of the condition, this newly discovered variant called Hearing-Motion Synesthesia is now technically the most common. Other types of synesthesia occur only in around 2-4% of the population, so when this phenomenon was discovered, scientists weren’t sure it should be classified as synesthesia. Either way, this type of synesthesia, or synesthesia-like phenomenon, is something I’m sure many of you may be able to relate to.

According to cognitive neuroscientist Elliot Freeman,

“Our study has provided the first evidence that a surprisingly high proportion of individuals can sometimes report auditory sensations evoked by visual flashes. This phenomenon is fascinating as it suggests that many of us can use our hearing to help us to remember visual sequences and process them more efficiently. In some people the ability to hear what we see such conversion of images into sounds might compensate for a poorer ability to discriminate pure auditory sequences” (Crew).

He goes on to reveal,

“The finding that this ‘hearing-motion’ phenomenon seems to be much more prevalent compared to other synaesthesias might occur due to the strength of the natural connection between sound and vision,” (Crew).

In other words, our brain is used to associating sounds with motion, so it makes sense that this sensory connection is much more common than others, such as taste and sound, which our brain is not used to associating.

I find this particularly fascinating because it allows many people to experience what other forms of synesthesia are like. If you are one of the people who can hear these gifs, how would you explain it? It isn’t that you are literally hearing the sound, since there is no sound actually traveling into your ears, but yet, you perceive that there should be sound.

Additionally, if you try to stop hearing the sounds coming from the gifs, does it work? Well, probably not. The phenomenon is completely involuntary, and although the sound is fake, it is not such an easy task to stop it, even after realizing that it isn’t actually there. I don’t know about you, but in my experience, this hearing-motion synesthesia can turn out to be kind of annoying, especially if the sound of the gif is irritating yet the gif itself is enjoyable.

Since the same rules apply to other types of synesthesia, such as grapheme-color and sound-color as I described in other posts, being able to hear these gifs means that you can better understand how the condition feels! Let me know in the comments if you are part of that 22%!

Guttman study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810016303336

Crew article:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-identified-a-weirdly-common-form-of-synaesthesia