Ticker Tape Synesthesia | Hacker News Reader

Ticker Tape Synesthesia

thesynesthesiatree.com

47 pointsdaverol22 comments

>No figure is yet known for the exact prevalence of "ticker tapers" among the synesthete and non-synesthete population, but an interesting study (Holm, Eilertsen and Price, 2015) found that almost half the general population reported some kind of mild experience of this type.

Amazing, I wonder what else I have no idea of will eventually turn out to be experienced by half the population.

The study is here

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17588928.2015.1...

It's interesting but I think the citation is a little misleading. I think the samples of convenience probably oversample for this kind of thing, and some of what they include is stretching the definition of tickertape synesthesia a bit. They say true tickertape synesthesia is probably rare.

The study itself is fair enough imho, I just think that citation is a little misleading without more elaboration, even with the "mild" disclaimer.

Having an internal monologue (thinking in words/sentences) is actually a minority thing.

Wait. Is it? I see pictures if I focus, but it's mostly like a conversation with someone who lives inside my head.

When I'm tired I sometimes get an inner monologue that just keeps going, but it's nonsensical, like a Markov chain. I have to actively stop it. Annoying.

I get this too! I have to be really tired, lying down and calm. I always think of it as listening to the noise of my subconscious. Mine isn't continuous, more I can pick up nonsensical phrases every 10-20 seconds. I've never heard of anyone else having this!

Have you tried voicing it out loud and recording yourself?

> Having an internal monologue (thinking in words/sentences) is actually a minority thing.

I'm often in robotic mode but as soon as I "think", it's internal monologue (either in french or in english and, maybe maybe maybe, sometimes in code!?).

But I don't have that "stock market ticker tape" thinggamagic: never happened to me to visualize words like that.

Is it really? Would be super interested in reading up on that (not doubting, just very curious)

X to doubt, full of self-important wieners with pitiful imaginations, that are jealous my "red" is "redder" than their "red":

I cant actually picture red; but its a lack of articulateness and a vocal minority rarely-intersecting that drown out my lack of understanding or doubt.

indiscernible from crying, they "cannot also picture red, by a way less than you can empathize with"

nobody actually sees what they think. the wall is blank.

those drifters are usually debris or thiccer blood cell components

You can't picture red and the wall is blank? Sounds like you have aphantasia.

thank you.

Interesting. I have aphantasia, visual snow, and at least audio-tactile / sound-color / space-concept synesthesia. I often see a grid of dense, contextually sensitive symbolics overlaid onto backgrounds. For example, I see math-like things on white walls, charts & graphs when I look at gray ones, and kanji-like strokes when I watch anime (I studied Japanese years ago).

As a researcher in AGI, it makes me wonder if synesthesia is just a mixture of any senses that happen to develop particularly strong associations rather than a separate pathway. My synesthesia certainly has been getting stronger the more I learn.

The only way I can copy Morse Code in my head is to visualize the letters being typed as I hear them and reading it back. I originally learned code by developing a "reflex" action to write the letter as I heard it; when I went to higher speeds (~50wpm) (before computer decoding was available) I'd type it on a typewriter as I heard it.

I wonder if this happens in ideogram-based languages, such as Chinese

hmm, do you have some hypothesis as to why that would make a difference?

I could probably come up with a bunch of plausible reasons it would make a difference, and a bunch for why it wouldn't.

Seems like a good question to ask for that reason alone... it strikes me as the type of datapoint that would allow researchers to narrow in on what's going on in the brains of people who experience it.

No! For example, I’m a terrible artist, but I don’t think in words. So I think images, but it doesn’t cross over to my aesthetic abilities.

But I wonder if the process of building up words from phonemes or syllables in your mind somehow maps differently from doing it with ideograms.

I do this when I'm trying to really focus on what the speaker is saying. It helps keep my mind from wandering. It's completely voluntary, though.

Sort of amazing. Sounds like LitRPG come to life.

Oh. Huh. Yeah, this is how my internal monologue works. Thoughts can appear in bold font, italics, sizes and colors, etc. I hear my thoughts at the same time; the two blend together as if they're one modality. This has an interesting effect when I'm processing symbols ("'$#{} etc), which have their own monosyllabic "tokens" in my head which don't necessarily sound different from one another at the audio level (they're like little grunts), but are distinct on some level of processing. Helps me read and write code quickly. There's also a sense of motion and direction attached - a semicolon in a sentence can feel like the stream of "ticker tape" is taking a 90° turn and continuing on in that new direction, for example.

I dont have this but I have experienced this rarely in some dreams, where a concept appears as an object or a shape and you know it.

In one very old dream I saw love as a yellow space ship like object. In that moment in that dream, these two weren't separate from each other. May be that's not synesthesia but that's how I understand it.

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