"Car journeys with my partner are a nightmare. He's an ex-DJ so he likes to crank the music up, but for me this means seeing static images and flashes of light in my mind's eye while I'm trying to drive. It's hard to describe exactly what I see when I hear sound. But it's almost like the sound waves you'd see if you watched an audio recording on a screen, or these little neurons connecting and space nebulas exploding in front of me."
"I'm 44 now and only realised I had auditory-visual synaesthesia in my 30s. What I did know was that I seemed to have an extraordinary ability for linguistics. In school I studied Japanese and did really well without trying because I could literally see the words and sounds presented as images in front of me, making them easy to remember."
The narrator experiences auditory-visual synaesthesia in which sounds trigger vivid visual images and flashes that can interfere with tasks such as driving, especially when music is loud. The visuals resemble audio waveforms, connecting neurons, and exploding nebulas. The condition remained unrecognized until the 30s despite an early and effortless aptitude for languages; Japanese, Spanish, Korean, and Indonesian were learned with ease because words and sounds appeared as memorable images. A high score on a language aptitude test surprised others. Exposure to neurodivergence literature and later speech-to-text computational linguistics work led to recognition of the shapes tied to phonemes.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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