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
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.
>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.