But they also found certain moving images provoke the experience more than others. With data from more than 4,100 participants (some volunteer, some paid it’s not a representative sample), the pair found that the experience of vEAR is very common. The survey shows you GIFs, and all you have to do is rate how much of an auditory sensation each one elicits. It’s similar to what Fassnidge and his PhD adviser Elliot Freeman used in their new study in Cortex. You can test yourself for vEAR with this survey here.
In the past, these people perhaps would have just kept their unusual experience to themselves. There are millions of people who watch YouTube ASMR videos to experience a mysterious tingling sensation. It’s part of a growing trend: The internet is proving to be an intriguing space for people to gather and discuss the peculiarities of human perception. The Reddit forum /r/noisygifs is filled with people posting and discussing the GIFs that fill their heads with sounds. The rising popularity of GIFs (which are really just silent slices of film) seems to have made many people aware of the sensation for the first time. (I don’t hear anything with the other GIFs.) It’s somewhere at the hazy intersection between a real sensation and imagination. For me, the experience is weirder than the normal experience of hearing. “It would be odd that your heartbeat would be syncing with what you are seeing so closely,” he says.
But then I counted: The power line is jumping at 52 beats per minute my heart is going at 72. At first, I thought I was just noticing my heartbeat.
In the GIF above depicting the transmission towers jumping rope, I noticed a slight thudding sound. “Maybe because they co-occur so frequently you either aren’t aware of the mental sound until you strip away everything else,” Fassnidge says. We may not think about the sound visual motion makes because sound and motion co-occur all the time. Those who rated more than half of the GIFs at a level of 3 or above were considered to have experienced vEAR. In the study in Cortex, the scientists had participants view 24 GIFs and rate if they noticed an auditory sensation on a scale of 0 to 5. “A lot of people don’t realize they have this thing until you start testing for it in the laboratory,” Fassnidge says. Though the work is early, the published papers on vEAR suggest it’s a common phenomenon, with around 20 to 30 percent of people reporting hearing silent images. There are only a handful of studies on vEAR the first one was published in 2008. And then other people say it varies depending on what it is they are looking at.” For other people, it’s kind of like a white noise. “Some people describe it as a buzzing sound in their head. And the experience of it “varies from person to person,” Fassnidge says. Similarly, vEAR could be a crossover of the visual and auditory systems of the brain. And it’s pretty rare: Around 3 percent of people have these forms of synesthesia.
It’s believed these crossovers happen because neurons from one area of the brain are highly connected to another, or because the connections between the brain areas are easily triggered.
#Auditory illusions buzzing skin
There’s a form of synesthesia where certain sounds produce physical sensations on the skin and in the body. The classic example is people who see a different color for different letters of the alphabet or for different numbers. In people with synesthesia, activation of one sense triggers perception of another. “The more we learn about the brain,” says Fassnidge, who recently completed his PhD at City University of London, “the more we learn it’s a very multisensory organ and that the senses can influence one another.” What is synesthesia? Getty Images It’s possible that just like we combine taste and smell to get a complete experience of flavor, we may in part hear with our eyes. Psychologist Chris Fassnidge, the lead author of the Cortex study, calls this weirdly common phenomenon vEAR, or “visually evoked auditory response.” He and his co-authors believe it may be a new form of synesthesia, the rare neurological phenomenon wherein different sensory experiences are connected.Įven if it’s not precisely synesthesia, vEAR may be a window onto a better way to understand how all our senses are complexly connected.
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