I see sounds as shapes. Synaesthesia has given me an extraordinary ability for languages

Kim Elms, a speech pathologist, shares her experience as an auditory-visual synaestheteRead more stories of synaesthesia in the way I feel seriesCar journeys with my partner are a nightmare. He’s an ex-DJ so he likes to crank the music up, but for me this means seeing static images and flashes of light in my mind’s eye while I’m trying to drive. It’s hard to describe exactly what I see when I hear sound. But it’s almost like the sound waves you’d see if you watched an audio recording on a screen, or these little neurons connecting and space nebulas exploding in front of me.I’m 44 now and only realised I had auditory-visual synaesthesia in my 30s. What I did know was that I seemed to have an extraordinary ability for linguistics. In school I studied Japanese and did really well without trying because I could literally see the words and sounds presented as images in front of me, making them easy to remember. At university I majored in Spanish, Korean and Indonesian and it was no effort at all. I then joined the air force as an intelligence officer because I didn’t want to become a teacher or translator. I walked away from the language aptitude test thinking I’d either messed it up or that it had been the easiest thing I’d ever done in my life. No one’s ever managed to get every answer right, they said when the results came back. But I hadn’t even tried. It just came naturally. Continue reading...