Real life subtitles

Never heard of this

Not gonna lie, more than a few times this would have come in handy
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Imagine having a conversation with someone and seeing each word they use appear before your eyes like subtitles in a film, or even as speech bubbles near the speaker’s mouth.

Now, picture trying to read a book on a crowded train, only to have the sentences spoken around you intrude on your vision, as if they were printed right in front of your eyes.

Or, even more intriguing, seeing your own thoughts written out in your mind’s eye. This is the everyday experience of those living with ticker-tape synaesthesia.

“When you and I talk, everything you say appears as written words in my mind,” says François Le Chevalier, 73, over Zoom. “It’s just like when I am reading – sometimes the words appear handwritten, other times typewritten, and occasionally even in bold.”

Synaesthesia refers to the blending of the senses. In the most common form, sounds are seen as colours. Ticker-tape synaesthesia – named after 19th-century machines that printed news and stock prices on thin paper strips, or “tickers” – describes a different manifestation of this trait.

The experience can vary widely. “Classically it would be a visualisation, where people see subtitles in their mind’s eye, but there is a lot of variation in how this appears,” says Mark Price, a professor in psychology at the University of Bergen who works as part of the Bergen Laboratory for the Study of Decision, Intuition, Consciousness, and Emotion.

He explains that in some, less common instances, the mind may project the subtitles as if they were appearing in the external world. The experience can differ in whether the subtitles are static or moving, whether full words or just parts of them appear, or only certain key words are highlighted.

For some, it might feel as though their mind is mimicking the physical act of writing the word, a phenomenon known as motor imagery. “Some might notice typing words on a phone or a computer keyboard,” says Price.

And it’s nots just spoken words that appear as written, but pseudowords too, according to Fabien Hauw, a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institute.

“Pseudowords, which although not real words are phonologically correct, can also be visualised by people experiencing ticker-tape synaesthesia,” he says. “Subtitled speech can appear for noises that can be translated in a phonological way.

For example, when someone is laughing, some may see it appear written as ‘hahaha’. For others, if they hear a cat meowing, they may see the word ‘meow’ written.”…….


https://www.theguardian.com/science...e-comes-with-subtitles?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other