Ithink of a conversation with someone and see every word they use appear before your eyes like subtitles in a movie, or even as speech bubbles near the speaker’s mouth. Now imagine trying to read a book on a crowded train, only to have the sentences being spoken around you enter 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 tape synaesthesia.
“When you and I talk, everything you say appears as written words in my mind,” says François Le Chevalier (73) about Zoom. “It’s just like when I read – sometimes the words appear handwritten, other times typed, and sometimes even in bold.”
Synaesthesia refers to the mingling of the senses. In the most common form, sounds are seen as colors. Ticker-tape synaesthesia – named after 19th-century machines that printed news and stock prices on thin strips of paper, or “tickers” – describes another manifestation of this trait.
The experience can vary greatly. “Classically it would be a visualization, where people see captions in their mind’s eye, but there is a lot of variation in how that appears,” say Market Pricea professor of 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 cases, the mind can project the subtitles as if they appeared in the external world. The experience may differ in whether the subtitles are static or moving, whether complete words or only parts of them appear, or whether only certain keywords are highlighted. For some, it may feel as if their mind is imitating the physical act of writing the word, a phenomenon known as motor imagery. “Some may see themselves typing words on a phone or a computer keyboard,” says Price.
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And it is not only spoken words that may appear as written, but pseudo words also, according to Fabien Hauw, a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institute. “Code words, which although not real words are phonologically correct, can also be visualized by people experiencing tape synesthesia,” he says. “Subtitled speech can occur for sounds that can be translated in a phonological way. For example, when someone laughs, some may see it as written as ‘hahaha’. For others, when they hear a cat meow, they can see the word ‘meow’ written.”
Ten years ago, when François Le Chevalier began learning Chinese, he found that when he pronounced words, their phonetic spelling would appear in his mind’s eye, interfering with the actual characters. Then Le Chevalier, who afterwards became one of Hauw’s study participantsopened it to a friend, her surprise made him realize that not everyone sees the world the way he does. For him, it’s an automatic process, which he describes as similar to dictation: he constantly sees spoken words in his mind, and even some of his own thoughts appear written down, specifically when he’s thinking about what to say next. When I ask if he sometimes feels overstimulated by it, he compares the experience to the “cocktail party effect”, where people have to tune out background conversations in order to focus on one single thing. Watching films with subtitles can sometimes be disorienting for him, as his brain is “writing” the spoken language while also processing the text on the screen.
Laurent Cohena neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institute and Hauw’s former PhD advisor, first encountered duct tape synesthesia two decades ago when a man wrote to him describing his mother’s experience. As a schoolgirl, she confided to friends that she could see words written near people’s mouths as they spoke. She laughed it off and kept the secret for decades, only revealing it to her son when she was 90.
This prompted Cohen to look at what might contribute to people experiencing the world in this way. In a recent paperCohen, Hauw, and their team used fMRIs to show that when people experiencing tape synaesthesia listen to speech, they have overactivation of two brain areas: the left perisylvian region, which is involved in processing speech, and the visual word-form area ( VWFA), which plays a key role in reading. “When people listen to speech, there is a greater increase in connectivity between those two regions in synaesthetes,” says Cohen. “We know that there are links between the visual cortex, which supports orthographic representation, and phonological regions.”
Orthographic representation refers to the way in which written words or letters are visually encoded and processed in the brain. This involves recognizing the shapes of letters and words, as well as understanding how these visual symbols correspond to specific sounds and meanings. Essentially, this is how we mentally store and remember the spelling and structure of written language. This process primarily involves the visual cortex, as it relates to how we visually perceive and interpret text.
Anyone who is literate will experience activations in this part of the visual cortex when they hear speech, but with tape synesthetes this activation appears to be increased, which may partly account for their experiences.
Interestingly enough, the brain regions that are overactive in tape synaesthesia overlap with regions that are underactive in dyslexia. “There is definitely an overlap between the two conditions in the cerebral reading system,” says Cohen. However, he emphasizes how they should not be seen as being on opposite ends of a spectrum. “They are both highly multidimensional. There are many varieties of dyslexia and probably many varieties of tape synaesthesia. So to put everything on one line is wrong.”
This increased connectivity between different sensory areas in the brain, as seen in those who experience tape synaesthesia, appears to be supported by other research performed on synaesthesia in general. As children develop, it is thought that unused neural connections being “cut away”which some believe may be a way to improve brain efficiency. In synaesthetes, some of these connections may remain, improving communication between different sensory areas. Another theory suggests that synaesthesia may result from reduced inhibition between these regions, allowing them to communicate more freely. When it comes to the question of whether genes play a role, “there are no genes identified as triggering synesthesia,” says Hauw, “but some research articles point to the idea of genetic influences. If you have synesthesia in your family , you seem to be more susceptible to developing it yourself.In Le Chevalier’s case, none of his siblings experience it, but his daughter and niece do.
As research continues to uncover the neural mechanisms behind this phenomenon, it opens the door to broader questions about how we all process and experience reality. Ultimately, tape synaesthesia is a reminder that for some, the mind’s eye contains a vivid and fascinating narrative of its own—one where words are not only heard, but also seen. Or in the words of Le Chevalier: “In our minds there are many things happening that we are not aware of at all, but which are important.”
