User:HelmholtzButLater/sandbox

NEW ARTICLE: Visually-Evoked Auditory Response

Visually-evoked auditory response (vEAR) is a perceptual phenomenon akin to synesthesia whereby people report experiencing sounds that aren't actually present when witnessing a visual stimulus involving motion or change. It is a form of cross-modal perception where different senses interact to form an experienced percept, but vEAR appears to be distinct from synesthesia. There are multiple potential explanations for vEAR that ongoing research seeks to test.

Research [early work, viral example sparks new research]

[Early work with morse code flashes, 2008, etc.]

[viral one from iamHappyToast, r/NoisyGifs]

Estimates of the prevalence vary, with perhaps 20 to 30 percent of people experiencing the effect. This is significantly more common than synesthesia, which is estimated to occur in roughly X percent of the population.[CITE]

For those who experience vEAR, the effect potentially may interfere with the detection of real sounds happening at the same time, but the mechanism for this is not fully understood.[CITE]

Is vEAR a form of synesthesia?

vEAR is similar to synesthesia in that the latter involves an automatic perceptual experience in one sensory modality caused not by an actual stimulus in that modality but by a stimulus in a different modality[CITE]. For example, a grapheme-color synesthete reading letters and numerals in a black font may perceive each letter and numeral as colored (e.g., 1 is blue, 2 is green, A is red). In synesthesia, this can occur even when there is no inherent natural pairing between the real stimulus and the automatically-provoked perceptual experience in the other modality; there is nothing in the numeral 1 that is blue, nor is the numeral 1 most commonly displayed in a blue color.[CITE]

vEAR, on the other hand, appears to happen mostly when there is a natural and previously-experienced correspondence between the visual stimulus and a sound that would normally go along with that stimulus. For example, when viewing a silent movie of an object smashing into glash, the vEAR experience is of hearing glass break, a sound which would normally co-occur with that visual input when happening in the natural world.[CITE]

As such, many researchers consider it a form of cross-modal perception more generally, rather than synesthesia specifically.[CITE] If it is a form of synesthesia, it would be much more common than other types, in which case it may be an acquired synesthesia based on the oft-experienced natural correspondence between a particular sight and its matching sound.[CITE]

Explanation and Theories

The causes and mechanisms of vEAR are not fully understood, but there are a number of potential explanations for the phenomenon.

Explanation [LTP, cross-modal wiring in the brain]

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Explanation [

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Conditioned (Pavlovian) Hallucinations and Predictive Coding

vEAR usually occurs for a visual stimulus that has in previous experience been repeatedly paired with a particular auditory stimulus (e.g., seeing a train whoosh by is paired with the sound of a train whooshing by). This repeated pairing is precisely how classical conditioning (a.k.a. Pavlovian conditioning) happens, whereby stimuli that co-occur -- whether simultaneously, or with one consistently before the other -- become associated in an organism's brain.[CITE TEXT]

Previous laboratory research has shown that repeated pairing across sensory modalities may lead to hallucinations of a stimulus in one modality when its oft-paired stimulus in another modality is presented alone. For example, one study repeatedly presented a visual checkboard pattern along with a 1000-Hz tone and found that when the checkboard was presented without the tone, many people mistakenly reported detecting the tone as present.

Researchers have argued this may be an effect of brain mechanisms based on predictive coding whereby the brain predicts upcoming neural signals and patterns based on prior associations with current signals and patterns; classically-conditioned hallucinations may be occur because the brain has strong Bayesian priors predicting an upcoming stimulus in the non-presented modality. Some researchers have argued that all perception of the world is a form of controlled hallucination, i.e. a simulation or representation of a three-dimensional world that corresponds well-enough with reality.[CITE Anil Seth?]

Explanation [Imagination / suggestible / voluntary vs. involuntary / mental imgry?]

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It may be more of a voluntary or semi-voluntary response for some, but occur more in people who are highly suggestible. In this explanation, it might be more like imagination or mental imagery, which can be either voluntary or involuntary in different people and contexts.[CITE]