You Won’t Believe How This Australian’s Unique Brain Can Learn 10 Languages at Once!

Imagine embarking on a car journey, the music blaring from the speakers, while your mind is flooded with a swirling array of static images and vibrant flashes. For one 44-year-old individual, these experiences are a daily reality due to a condition known as audiovisual synaesthesia. Only diagnosed in her 30s, she has spent years grappling with the complexities of her unique sensory perception while simultaneously harnessing her extraordinary linguistic abilities.

As a child, she excelled in languages without effort, studying Japanese in school and later majoring in Spanish, Korean, and Indonesian at university. “I could literally see the words and sounds presented as images in front of me,” she explained. This visual memory enabled her to learn languages rapidly, a skill that led her to serve as an intelligence officer in the air force. Notably, her performance on the language aptitude test was unprecedented; she completed it without a hitch, leaving her unsure of how she had achieved such an outcome. “I walked away thinking I’d either messed it up or that it had been the easiest thing I’d ever done,” she recalled, only to learn later that no one had ever achieved a perfect score.

Her introduction to the term "synaesthesia" occurred while transitioning into speech pathology after her military career. At that time, she began researching autism spectrum disorder and neurodivergence, discovering the fascinating phenomenon of synaesthesia, where stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers experiences in another. Despite her revelations, it was not until she engaged in speech-to-text computational linguistic work that she began to truly reflect on her own perceptions of sound.

In her quest to connect with others who shared similar experiences, she found a Facebook group dedicated to individuals who see sounds, although her experience differs in that she visualizes sounds as black and white shapes rather than colors. "The only time I see color is when I hear high-frequency sounds," she explained, noting that these sounds manifest as bright white flashes before transitioning through a spectrum of yellow, orange, and red. This unique ability has allowed her to excel in auditory tasks, even passing hearing tests at incredibly low decibel levels.

Her career took an exciting turn when she was connected with the head linguist for Apple, who was seeking expertise in phonetics for a new speech-to-text project. This opportunity led her to Japan for 90 days to work on what would become Siri. “I spent a lot of time in headphones,” she said, as she helped record Australian voices for the project. Since then, her passion for linguistics has only deepened, leading her to work on speech-to-text projects for companies like TomTom GPS and Bank of America. Today, she splits her time between these projects and her role as a speech pathologist, assisting both children and adults in improving communication and swallowing skills.

Despite the growth of artificial intelligence in the linguistic field, she remains unfazed. “Language is incredibly nuanced, and robots simply aren’t good enough to pick up those subtleties,” she asserted. Her ability to dissect even the most complex accents, such as those from western Sydney’s Lebanese community, gives her confidence that human touch will always be necessary in understanding language.

However, her form of synaesthesia presents unique challenges. To manage the constant sensory overload of our noisy world, she often resorts to wearing earplugs. “My brain feels busy pretty much constantly,” she explained, but she finds solace in running to music, a rare moment when her brain quiets down, allowing her to escape into the rhythm without visualizing sound.

Reflecting on her journey, she expressed a profound connection to her work, stating, “I feel so lucky that I found this field of work when I did.” She describes her profession as her “ikigai,” a Japanese term meaning “reason for being.” Driven by her passion for language and communication, she would continue her work long into her later years if possible, stating, “I’d do it for free if I didn’t have bills to pay.” Her story serves as a compelling reminder of the beauty and complexity of human perception, illustrating how unique abilities can lead to fulfilling careers and contributions to society.