Similar cases of visual imagery loss have been reported as well. Some stroke survivors lose their inner speech but can still speak out loud, while others lost overt speech to a stroke, while their inner speech remained intact. My team's study showed some stroke survivors cannot hear their own voice in their heads after damage to the left hemisphere of their brain. Research shows some people are born without the ability to see pictures in their mind, while others might lose this ability-following brain damage, for instance. What happens then, when our minds cannot create mental images? In that sense, you can argue we are all on a spectrum of image creation. This shows how more information, even if it is only an image in our minds, can help us better remember and understand the world around us. For example, after being trained to create visual images in their minds about a story that was being read to them, children who had difficulty understanding stories, scored higher on tests of story comprehension. During the time of COVID restrictions when masks were mandatory, many people realized how much harder they found it to understand others when they couldn't see their mouth.Īs is the case with TTS, we can sometimes boost the amount or type of information available to us by creating images in our minds. For example, when listening to speech that is not easily comprehensible, perhaps because of background noise, people better understand what is being said if they can see the speaker's mouth move. As they evolved, our brains became experts in tying information from different senses together.īinding information from different senses can help us reach faster and more accurate decisions. So if we also saw, or even smelled an animal in the scrub behind us, we could more easily determine if it was a dangerous predator we needed to escape from, or a fluffy little rabbit. More information helps us make the right choice. For example, upon hearing a sound coming from the bushes, humans had to quickly decide how to react. When our ancestors walked on the African savanna more than 100,000 years ago, fast recognition of what they heard or saw was essential. There is an evolutionary explanation for this. But the ability to process information from different senses at the same time is often helpful. In fact, some cannot stop, even when it makes it difficult to follow conversations when lots of people are talking at once. While many adults can imagine written words when listening to speech if asked to do so, people with TTS are different because of the ease with which it happens. One participant told the researchers how after a few days of hearing a bird singing in his garden, he started seeing a written word in his mind that represented the bird's song. But three said it did not start until adolescence.Īround 40% of participants had TTS even in response to animal sounds, and 90% had it as a response to their inner voice. There was some variety in how long people had had TTS, with 19 of the 26 participants with TTS saying they had experienced it since they learned to read, or for as long as they can remember. Even though ticker tape (or subtitle) synesthesia (TTS) was first studied in 1883 by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, little was known about it until lately.Ī study published recently, one of the first to explore this condition in more depth, found that of the 26 participants with TTS, most had additional types of synesthesia, most commonly space-time or number-space, where they experience time or numbers as a location. There's even a type of synesthesia in which people's minds run a written text on a mental ticker tape. Some people see shapes in their mind when they hear music, or imagine colors when they see a number (a phenomenon called synesthesia). We range from those who are "mind blind" and cannot visualize things mentally to those who have brilliant images in their mind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |