A collection of weird snippets

"Dr. Lepine recently had in his office a woman thirty years old... who constantly heard a series of twenty-five words uniformly and regularly following each other without any apparent meaning. This woman had the distinct impression that these words were not pronounced aloud, and yet she heard them, and, strangely enough, she heard them not in her ears but in her left cheek." - The Science of Illusions

"In 1936 BF Skinner prepared recordings of three to five vowels cyclically repeated many times. The persons listening to them first thought they heard three to five syllables of an indistinct conversation, then came to believe they understood what the voice was saying to them; it concerned their private lives. The subjects were sure that their descriptions were accurate." "A kind of irrepressible association called 'synesthesia' affects at least one person in every two thousand: those so affected hear 'colored vowels'...in 1883 Galton conducted an investigation in English and found four subjects who associated the sound 'o' with the color white and four others who associated it with other colors....the most serious recent study in Great Britain indicates that there is a very strong tendency there to associate the 'o' with white. Otherwise, the most frequent associations were of 'u' with yellow or light brown, and 'i' with white or pale gray." Abstract: "Four chinchillas were trained to respond differently to /t/ and /d/ consonant-vowel syllables produced by four talkers in three vowel contexts. This training generalized to novel instances, including synthetically produced /da/ and /ta/ (voice-on-set times of 0 and +80 milliseconds, respectively). In a second experiment, synthetic stimuli with voice-onset times between 0 and +80 milliseconds were presented for identification. The form of the labeling functions and the "phonetic boundaries" for chinchillas and English-speaking adults were similar." (Kuhl and Miller 1975) ---- And, a humorously incoherent sentence: "Mariotte was interested in the physics of gases and in the sound of the trumpet; he wrote The Treatise on Percussion."