Speaking of Psychology - Encore - Tasty words, colorful sounds - How people with synesthesia experience the world, with Julia Simner, PhD

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

More than 4% of people have some form of synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes senses to link and merge. People with synesthesia may taste words, hear colors, or see calendar dates arrayed in physical space. Dr. Julia Simner, a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Sussex in the U.K., discusses the many forms of synesthesia, how synesthetes experience the world, and what scientists have learned from brain imaging studies about synesthesia. She also discusses her research on other sensory differences such as misophonia, an extreme aversion to specific sounds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaking of Psychology is taking a summer break, so we're rerunning one of our favorite episodes from the past. In July 2021, I talked to psychologist Julia Simner about how people with synesthesia experience the world and what we can learn from studying this fascinating condition. We hope you enjoy this episode from the archives. Speaking of Psychology, we'll be back with new episodes in a couple of weeks. Thank you for listening. Words that taste like orange candy, music that projects brilliant, shimmering colors, numbers that come with personalities and full life stories. These are all forms of synesthesia, a neurological condition in which senses such as taste, touch, smell, and vision, link or merge.

Historical accounts of people with synesthesia date back hundreds of years, but it's only in recent decades that scientists have been able to use brain imaging, and other modern research methods to gain a better understanding of how synesthesia works and why it might occur. So what does it like to have synesthesia? What might cause it, and how do the brains of people with synesthesia differ from those of people without it? What can we learn about the human mind more generally from studying synesthesia and other sensory differences? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science. and everyday life. Our guest today is Dr. Jules Simner, a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Sussex

in the United Kingdom, who specializes in multisensory research. She has studied synesthesia in adults and children for nearly two decades. She also researches other sensory differences, including misophonia, an extreme aversion to certain sounds, and Afantasia, the inability to see pictures in your mind's eye. We'll discuss these today too and talk about what links to things. these threads of research together. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Simner. Thanks very much for the invitation. Some of our listeners have probably heard of synesthesia, or at least the most common forms of it, like people seeing colors when they hear music. But synesthesia is a lot

more varied than people may realize, and you've written and tested for 128 different types. What types are out there? What are the differences and the commonalities? So it's quite hard to estimate exactly how many types of synesthesia there are because some could be quite well hidden, but the ones we know most about are the ones that people can realize most readily and report to us most easily. And I think for that

reason, we tend to think of the most common types of synesthesia as being the ones that trigger unusual colour perceptions. So experiencing colours when you are reading words, looking at numbers, listening to music,

and then perhaps more obscurely swimming, so different swimming strokes, causing different colour perceptions, perhaps even reading Braille also and watching signers in sign language, all of these are known to trigger colours. But as I said, although people talk about colours most often in the context of synesthesia, I think it may be that colours are just the easiest to report because there are many different other synesthetic sensations so you could experience flavours that flood the mouth. So your reading and your mouth is being bombarded with sensations of Yorkshire pudding

or processed peas or bitter lemon or nice orange fruit sweets which is what Julia tastes of, my name Julia, or perhaps less pleasant taste. so the taste of earwax or other things that you wouldn't want in your mouth, maybe vomit and so on. So that's also another type of synesthesia we know about. But to answer your question, there are many different kinds of synesthesia. They can trigger colours, taste, smells, textures, bodily feelings, and the compulsion even to put your body into certain shapes or formation.

So I remember a very rare case from many years ago of a professor who had an urge to form shapes with his body in response to different words that he heard. So many types. So you said your name has a flavor? Is that universal? How does your name have a flavor? Yeah, that's a good point. So what I described to you, and I think he wouldn't mind me mentioning this at all, what I described to you was the taste of, of the taste of the name Julia as experienced by synestique James Wanerton.

Now James Wanerton is a particularly special and important synesthette for me. Not only have I studied James for the last 20 years, but James has been an amazing advocate for the synesthesia community. He is the president of the UK Synesthesia Association. And he has taken part in so much outreach himself to help people, to understand the condition. And for James, the name Julia tastes of orange fruit sweets. It's actually a branded fruit sweet.

Yeah, and the interesting thing is most people call me Jules Simna. They use my nickname Jules, but with James, we don't do that because Jules does not taste as nice as Julia. Jules has a bit of an unpleasant taste. James politely tells me it tastes of porridge. I think it may actually taste of grotes. drool or saliva because we know that there are links between the word that trigger synesthesia and the type of taste experienced. And from my 20 years of research, I rather suspect that Jules taste of drool, which is why we

use the name Julia. So do people with music and color synesthesia actually see colors in the world around them when they hear music? or is it more like just something in their mind's eye? So the answer to that depends on the synestite you're speaking to because there are several different ways that synesthetes can experience their colour. So this was captured quite nicely by our colleagues, Mike Dixon and Daniel Smilick and their team in Canada.

They were able to name projector synesthetes versus associator synesthetes. So associate a synesthetes experience their colours somewhere in the mind's eye like a kind of strong internal mental imagery. Projector synesthetes will see their colours projected out in the outside world. So a couple of examples. If you have coloured letters and numbers and are a projector synestite, you may see those colours superimposed onto the text that you're reading. or if I'm sure he wouldn't mind me describing or as described to me by synesthesia scientist Julian Asher, those colours can be projected out there in the world floating in space.

So Julian Asher is a geneticist who helped us to understand the genetics of synesthesia. And he told me that when he was a young boy, his parents would take him to the symphony and he assumed that the house lights dimmed so that people could see the colours better because for him the orchestra has colours floating above it. He actually thought, why else would anybody dim the house lights apart from to see the synesthetic colours better? That's amazing. So in your mind or in the outside world, yeah.

And sometimes experience in unusual ways, I remember a student of mine from 20 years ago who experienced pain as colors, and for her, the colors were a cone that projected from her head in color. And if she thought very hard about the shape of the cone, she could moderate the pain of the headache. How common is synesthesia and what's the prevalence in the population? Do we know? Well, yes, so this is something I've spent quite a lot of the last 20 years looking into. our first estimates for commonness were based on asking synesthetes to come forward. So there was a very nice study by Simon Baron Cohen and his colleagues in 1996, and they placed an advert in the newspaper in Cambridge, UK,

and it described synesthesia, and it asked synesthetes to come forward. And he found that the prevalence of synesthesia was one in 2000 from that study. Now, of course, unfortunately, and of course they knew this, they would be radically underestimating because they were relying on synesthetes to buy the newspaper that day, to read the article, to come forward, you know, which are lots of things that filter out people through that process. So in 2000 and in the early 2000s, my colleague Jamie Ward and I decided to, instead of relying on synesthetes to come forward, we started to go out into the general population.

we would gather large groups of people together and screen every single one of them. And this gave us a sort of better estimate, really, of the prevalence of synesthesia. And since then, I've individually screened almost 20,000 people for synesthesia. And from that, we have quite a good idea that synesthesia is at least 4.4% in the population. So at least one in 23 people have synesthesia. In that study, we were looking at around 140. 40 different types of synesthesia, but we had missed out some quite crucial types. So we also know independently that around 10% of people see time or numbers or letters mapped out in space.

Now, that would add another sort of 10% to that figure that I gave earlier. We also know that at least one to two percent of the population have personalities for letters, numbers, days of the week, months of the year. So we would have to add that on as well. So, but it does really come down to what you think synesthesia is. If you think these numbers are getting quite high, they are, but you might want to question whether numbers mapped out in space, whether time mapped out in space, is a synesthesia. Because 10% of the population experiencing that makes us start to question, well, is this really synesthesia at all? But a very simple answer is at least 4% of the. the population. Now, that's an interesting prevalence because that feels small. 4.4% feels small,

but it's actually equivalent to the entire population of the United States in the world. So if you were to gather all synesthetes together, that would be 307 million synesthetes worldwide, which is, you know, somewhere approximating the USA population. So it's a rare condition, but not insignificant. And do you know, is it more common in men or women, or is it equally distributed? See, that's a very nice question again because it speaks to methodologies. So this early study of prevalence conducted by placing an advert in the newspaper and asking synesthetes to come forward gave the very, very strong impression that it was a female trait because I think something like eight times as many female synesthetes were found as males.

So it put across the message that synesthesia was a female trait and that stayed with us for about a decade. However, it turns out that that was a trick of the methodology, a confound in the methodology, because in fact, we know from many other studies that women with unusual conditions are simply more likely to come forward. So what we actually have is a condition which is balanced across the senses. When you go out and screen people through a large population, you find the same number is the same number of male and female synesthetes. But when you ask them to come forward, the men hold back and the women reach out to scientists. I mentioned in the introduction that in the past couple of decades, scientists have begun using brain scans to understand what's happening

in the brains of people with synesthesia. What have they found? Do the brains of people with synesthesia look different or function differently from the brains of people who don't have it? Yeah, I think brain imaging in synesthesia has been the most important scientific step forward in 200 years. I remember giving synesthesia lectures and synesthesia talks before the advent of these brain imaging findings. And I would spend the entire talk trying to persuade people that synesthesia was real. Now, somewhere around 2005, we got a sudden proliferation of imaging studies. And that was wonderful because now when I give synesthesia talks, the first thing I do is show the brain of a synestate in an fMRI image, for example, and the brain of a control, and they're so very different that I no longer have to struggle to persuade people on genuineness. So what do they show? These brain imaging studies show very nicely that the brains of synesthetes are different to those of people without synesthesia. They're different in their functionality. So in fMRI, we can see that. Color selective regions or regions close to colour areas in the visual cortex will light up

in response to reading black and white numbers for synesthetes, when obviously for controls those same regions would only light up if they were exposed to colour in the real world. And also some very nice data from our Dutch colleagues has shown that synesthetes have different structural qualities in their brain. So, differences in their white matter coherence in different parts of the brain. So greater white matter connectivity, near color selective regions, for example. Also, other interesting differences, differences in frontal areas, differences in parietal areas that might be linked to a greater binding.

So binding is where we bring together different features of the world. So, for example, if I look at a green or apple, the greenness is in one part of the body. my brain. The shape of the apple is in another part of my brain. The binding region helps to bring those pieces of information together. And synestites have differences in parietal areas that deal with binding, almost as if they're overbinding features. They're not only binding the colours of apples to the shapes of apples. They're binding the colours of apples to letters and numbers and music and so on. So yeah, brain imaging has really revolutionised what you do.

So do researchers like you have any theories as to why synesthesia develops? And is it hereditary? Do you, is there a cause? Or you're just born with it? So on the question of inheritance, it does seem to be genetically endowed in some way, rather than, well, for a start, we do know, first of all, that it passes down through families. So a study back in 2005 with my colleague Jamie Ward showed that if you have synesthesia in the family, you're much more likely to have it sort of, you're more. like to have it popping up through generations than much more likely than you expect from chance alone. So it's passing through families. Now, of course, it could be learned. It could be parents teaching children. But we know that's not the case for several reasons. First of all, parents and children are likely to have very different kinds of synesthesia. So what's being passed on is a sort of predisposition for synesthesia. But you might have a parent with coloured letters whose son has tasty words. And so that suggests it's not being taught through the generations. And quite often for

that reason, families are not aware that they have so much synesthesia going on. So if I'm a person with coloured letters, why would I suddenly ask my child, what's the taste of Tuesday? It wouldn't happen. So quite often you get these families with multiple variants appearing. And then there are more direct genetics findings. So I mentioned earlier, Julian Asher did some pioneering research with Simon Baron Cohen on the genetics. More recently, the Max Planck Institute in Nymegan has got a fantastic genetics project going on, screening hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, hopefully thousands and thousands of synesthetes. And finding hotspots on chromosomes that are suggestive of synesthesia, it's unfortunately, it's not a clean picture. Sometimes in the genetics,

it's quite easy to point to genes. What we're finding is that different families seem to have, have different families and different variants of synesthesia seem to have different genetic profiles. So it hasn't been a very easy task or a very clean picture, but we have got these areas on the genome that are hotspots if you like for certain kinds of synesthesia in certain families. If a person with synesthesia experiences a trauma, such as a blow to the head or even a very high fever. Is that something that could make the synesthesia disappear? And conversely, if you didn't have it, but then you experienced a blow to the head, could it triggers synesthesia? Or is that just an off-the-wall question? Actually, I think both those things

are true. There are rare cases of acquired synesthesia after trauma. There are also cases of synesthesia disappearing under certain circumstances. Now, it's not very well studied because obviously we can't replicate this very one in the lab and nor would we want to because I wouldn't be the person to take away a synesthesia. But there are cases, there's anecdotal reports, there's some really reliable anecdotal reports. So there is a case of a very prominent synestead who has very sadly experienced the Japanese earthquake and felt for some time afterwards that his synesthesia was deadened. And that was quite a troubling thing for him to deal with. Luckily, it's come back. I've had also synesthetes contacting me, asking me about medication. They're

on a medication and suddenly the synesthesia is attenuated. When we give large surveys to synesthetes and ask them for self-reports, sometimes reports of caffeine making differences, but it's very hard for us to pin this down in the lab. So quite often you'll find these reports in case study journals, which are really useful. So one thing that you've written about that I found surprising was that people are not always reliable reporters of whether they have synesthesia. Some people with it don't realize they have it. Some non-synesthetes will say that they do. Why is that? And how do you test to determine whether someone actually has synesthesia.

So the first time I came across this, I was really surprised by quite how inaccurate self-report is in synesthesia. Let me answer this by telling you how we verify synesthesia first of all. So we have a very nice test for synesthesia that seems robust and has been used since 1989, early 90s. Again, this was a very nice test that Simon Baron Cohen was able to pioneer. So we test synesthetes by looking for a trait called consistency over time. So what we do is we ask synesthetes to tell us their associations.

And in fact, we do this in more sophisticated ways. So for example, we have tests that show the letters and numbers in a random order. Every time a grapheme appears, the synestites required to choose the specific synesthetic colour from a really fine-grained colour palette that has like 16 million colours. So an A will appear, the synestite will choose their exact shade of red. A seven will appear, the synestite will choose their exact shade of green and so on. And once they get to the end of the test, we surprise synesthetes and we repeat it. So they do the whole thing over and over again.

And they can do this anything from twice to maybe three times. And what we have at the end is each letter and number with the colours given to it over time by the same synestite. And then we can use a technique that allows us to look at colour distance. So when I ask you for the colour of A, the first time, and the second time, I plot those colours in space and I say, how close are they in space? Now, if you are consistent, those colours will be very close in colour space. You'll have said the same shade of red twice. If you ask a control, they'll be inventing it, making it up very inconsistent, very large distances in colour space. So we can quantify the consistency of a synestite in terms of, you know, distances in color space.

And this shows us that synesthetes are very, very, very, very consistent. You're not going to fool them. If you say what color is seven, they're always going to tell you exactly the same shade of, I don't know, subtle, lime, green. They're going to be spot on. And controls are going to be inconsistent. And so we have a threshold of consistency. Synesthetes have to be above the threshold in order to be validated as a synestite. So when we run these tests, we usually start by saying,

first of all, this is synesthesia, have you got synesthesia? And you would think that everybody who says yes goes on to be consistent and everybody who says no goes on to be inconsistent. But actually what we find is that for every true consistent synestate who says they have synesthesia, there are five non-sinistites saying they have synesthesia. And the reasons are actually not too surprising. There's a tiny bit of social desirability. It's quite nice. to say you have something interesting. But actually, there are a lot of artists who say they have synesthesia because what they have is a really fine-grained appreciation for colour. And that's quite easy to confuse. So lots of the non-cinesthetes, reporting synesthesia are artists. Some of them

are just sort of, some of them are just mistaken. Some of them are just not concentrating. But all in all, if I ever now review papers on synesthesia where there's no consistency test, it's dead in the water because you don't know you have synesthesia. So you were talking about artists and creative types. Is it more likely that a person who is creative and is an artist would have synesthesia? Is there actually some association? Sure, yes, there seems to be. So first of all, if you look within creative disciplines, you're more likely to find synesthetes.

Now, that makes it difficult because artists are more likely to inaccurately say they have synesthesia, but there's still more synesthesia among artistic people. So you have to really use these careful tests. But yes, you find synesthet's more likely to go into artistic professions and those professions are tied to their synesthesia. So more musicians with coloured music synesthesia, for example. We can also find evidence of higher creativity with lab tests. So for example, a test of creativity that's quite well-known.

known is the remote associates test. And in that test, you're given three words such as, you're given three words and you have to provide the fourth word that links them all. And I have to think carefully about this so I don't reveal the linking word, but an example might be boot, yeah, this is tough, boot, ground, summer. Now, those three words are linked by one other word, and that other word is camp. So boot camp, summer camp, campground. And this is a test of creativity, and synestities performed very well in this test. We also have evidence that this creativity is starting quite early. So we have recently finished a large ERC funded project. So European Research Council funded us to look at

synesthesia in children for five years. And we can even see those creativity traits emerging early in children. So when we find children with synesthesia from the general population, so we're not relying on people to come forward. We've screened thousands of children. We've found the synesthetes among them and we look at their personality and the children don't really realize they're special. The parents don't know that their children have synesthesia, but everybody concurs that these synesthetes are higher in the trait of openness to experiences, which is linked to intellectual curiosity but also creativity. So children themselves feel that they're more creative in their personalities. Their parents feel they have more creative personalities. And we can see this from really

a young age, from the age of around. I think the children we tested were between six and ten. And we can see these effects emerging, you know, by, if not by six, then by, you know, seven or eight. So yes, creative population. So you've done research that's found that even though most people do not have synesthesia, they do have cross-sensory experiences or associations, for example, associating higher-pitched tones with brighter colors. Can you tell us about that research and how it relates to synesthesia? Sure. This is always an area of research that can really play with my head because we look at many different sensory domains and we look at how they cross-over in many different ways. So I'm going to think carefully. So the one that you just described is actually

a great finding by, among other people, my colleague Jamie Ward. He has shown that people systematically associate the pitch of music with colours in several ways. So, for example, higher pitch. So imagine a test where I play you sounds and I ask you to choose colours and you feel like you're randomly picking because I play you a high pitch sound, a low pitch sound, a, you know, a stringed instrument, a piano. and I just ask you to pick colours and you kind of, you're willing to do this task, although you suspend disbelief because you think you're going to be random.

And actually, people are very, very consistent. Higher pitch sound maps to more luminant colours. So imagine a piano, imagine I'm on a piano and I'm tinkling on the high notes and I'm crashing on the low notes and I say to you which one of those is pale yellow. And you are much more likely to say that the pale yellow is the higher pitch note. Okay, and maybe deep dark purple is the low pitch note. So there's that, there's that association. But there are many, many, many of these associations.

So we have shown that if you give people an identical sweetie, an identical candy, and it either has a rough surface or a smooth surface, they will think that the candy is more sour with the rough surface, even though it has the identical ingredients. And here's something quite fun. We have recently been looking at the same phenomenon. in dogs. So research in collaboration with my colleague David Reby and our student Anna Koshanovska, who's leading this research, we have taken domestic dogs into the lab and we show them different

objects. So they're either objects of a different size or they're elevated differently in space and we play sounds and we train the dogs in advance to go to the object that's making a sound. and what we find is that they're much more likely to target the small object when the sound is high-pitched and the large object when the sound is low-pitched. And similarly, when the sound is high-pitched, they look up to an object up in space, and when the sound is low-pitch, they look down to an object on the ground. So this shows associations between on the one-hand sound and on the other hand the visual property of size or the visual property of elevation in space.

And that's some really exciting work that's been really fun to conduct. Wow, that's amazing. So let me change gears a little bit, because in addition to synesthesia, you study a variety of other brain and sensory differences. For example, as I said earlier, misophonia, which is an extreme aversion to specific sounds, and Afantasia, which is the inability to picture things in your mind's eye. These seem like really disparate concepts, but how do they tie together?

That's such a good question because... Or do they? Yeah, that's a really good question because I found myself working in synesthesia for a couple of decades and then being introduced to other sensory differences, finding them fascinating, berating myself for not having focus for effectively coming away from synesthesia, finding out over time that these different conditions are tied by kind of invisible thread. So all of them are sensory differences and they all share certain traits in common. For example, in terms of well-being, so we find that people with these sensory differences,

even synesthesia that sometimes considered a gift, can have impairments in their well-being, can have problems in their well-being. So for example, in synesthesia, we found that people, with synesthesia, with verified synesthesia, are significantly more likely to experience anxiety disorder than other people. We were really surprised about this. We weren't looking at particularly troubling variants. We were looking at coloured letters and numbers, higher rates of anxiety disorder. We've just finished a similar study in child synesthetes, and 30% of our child synesthetes under 10 qualify for sort of the category of anxiety disorder, which is really high,

usually in children it's around in our controls we've found it at around less than 10 synesthetes at 30% and similarly in these other disciplines in these other similarly in these other sensory differences so misophonia itself is it's almost defined by by difficulties in well-being so misophonia can give rise to great anxiety as well as so misophonia is an extreme hatred of certain sounds and those sounds tend to be bodily sounds like coughing or chewing or crunching or swallowing. And it can really give rise to these incredible differences in well-being, anxiety, rage, uncontrollable feelings, really, that we know are also linked to brain structure. And what we found in children as young as 10 is that children that we've been able to recognise as having misophonia are showing serious

differences in their well-being, again, elevated anxiety, as you might expect, but also poorer quality of life, poorer satisfaction in life. And then there's also the link with autistic-like traits. So the more we look at these sensory differences, the more we see parallels with and overlaps with autism. Now, it's not the case that having synesthesia means you're autistic, but it does mean that you're elevated on tests of autism in certain areas. So in misophonia, for example, you're significantly more likely to be diagnosed or recognized as having autism than the average person. In synesthesia, you're elevated on the traits of attention to detail. In synesthesia, you're elevated on the autistic trait of attention to detail.

And in misophonia, no, and in Afantasia, you're elevated in the autistic traits of social difficulties and imagination. And so, yes, there's this overlap of autistic traits. There's this overlapping well-being, poor well-being. So the more I look at many different sensory conditions, the more I'm convinced that they all really fit together in a kind of coherent whole. Here's one I'll throw at you. So we had a guest a few months back, did an episode on face blindness. And one of the people is someone I know who has been diagnosed with face blindness.

And she recently also learned that she has Afantasia. Have you looked at those connections? We have. We have and we are, actually. So I think in self-report, people with A Fantasia report being poorer at faces, on average. And a very nice study we're conducting here at Sussex, led by my PhD student Carla Dance, and in collaboration with my colleague Graham Holt, who's a witness recognition, a face recognition expert, we've been able to give identicates to people with Afantasia.

And we show them a face and then we ask them to reconstruct the face using these identities and then we give the reconstructed face to a group of controls and ask them, how similar is this reconstructed face with the original? And we do that once for our people with Afantasia and once for controls. And we're in the middle of doing that study right now. and we can see trends in the direction that we'd expect, but we need to finish that study to find out exactly whether it's significant, but it does look at the moment as if it's trending in the direction of what we would expect,

which is poorer face recall for people with Afantasia. Although I need to add something. This is only a typical of the average Afantasic. So what we actually find is a real spread, and it's quite interesting because I have Afantasia myself. but I'm almost a super recogniser. So when I perform tests of face recognition, I'm almost good enough to work for the police.

How am I doing that? How am I doing that? I have no mental imagery, but I'm just able to pick out a face in the crowd very well. So there you go. It's a spread, but the average person is less good than controls. So I'm just wondering if particularly Missifonia and Afantasia are debilitating to the people who have,

have these syndromes and is it possible to help someone learn to diminish, say, an aversion to sounds or to teach people how to see things in their mind's eye? Yeah, definitely. And I think that is definitely happening a lot more for misophonia. So misophonia is defined as a kind of almost chronic condition. And misophonia is also really a topic of focus for clinicians. A lot of clinicians are trying to find out exactly how we can fix this problem. There are some long-term clinical treatment options.

Cognitive behavioural therapy has been tried. A tinnitus retraining therapy, a counter-conditioning therapy. They aim to reconceptualise the individual's relationship with sound. Or they repair unpleasant sounds with more pleasant responses. some approaches combine therapy with gentle exposure. It's still quite a young science. It's still quite a young science. There isn't really an outstanding treatment that's emerging above all others.

We're just trying. Clinicians are just trying different options at the moment. Some of them are effective but not across the board. A fantasia is an interesting one. people aren't really trying to improve imagery at the moment in Afantasics. I mean, I know personally I found out I had Afantasia around 10 years ago. I was having an interesting chat with a colleague about synestites, and I said to him, these synestites are reporting that they can see pictures in their mind's eyes.

So if I say pig, they literally see an image of a pig. And I was speaking to my colleague Bob Logi, who said, well, that's what everybody does, isn't it? And I said, no, you don't understand. They see a picture in their mind. He said, yeah, that's what everybody does. So from that moment, 10 years ago, I have tried, personally speaking, I've tried to construct images. I don't, I haven't had a great deal of success, to be honest. Although that's an N of 1, so who knows, so maybe we might try it.

But really, the difference between Afantasia and Misophonia is that people with Afantasia are getting on fine. They're just getting on fine with their life. They really have no idea. They're different. They understand visual imagery as a metaphor. You know, they, it's really nice. not a big deal in my life. I'm not very good at interior decorating. I find that quite hard. What's this sofa going to look like against that wall? Really, apart from that, it's fine.

Well, this has been just amazingly interesting, Dr. Simna. I've really enjoyed talking to you. I appreciate your taking the time. Thank you. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www. speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at Speaking of Psychology at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word, at APA.org.

Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condihan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.