The man heard faster than he looked

Due to a rare brain defect, a British man always hears others say before seeing their lips move.

The strange disease made every conversation for the man nicknamed PH, 67, always look like a poor quality movie, in which "one place, act one".

Mr. PH was the first confirmed case of a disorder that made the brain process images significantly slower than sound processing. He began suffering from unusual symptoms after undergoing surgery.

New Scientist magazine quoted Mr. PH as saying: "I once told my daughter: I currently have 2 TVs that need refining!" . However, soon after, he realized that he was hearing his own voice before feeling his jaw move.

Doctors performed brain scans of PH patients and discovered two lesions in areas of the brain that controlled hearing, coordinated time and movement.

Light and sound move at different speeds, so image and sound data will reach the eyes and ears at different times. These signals are then processed at different speeds in the brain, but in normal people, these processes seem to happen at the same time.

PH's brain is thought to handle image data much slower than processing audio data, making the time inconsistency between them become too obvious and very large.

Elliot Freeman researcher and colleagues at the University of London conducted a number of sequential evaluation evaluations with short videos to validate PH's condition. The results showed that they had to turn on the sound more than 200 milliseconds, then Mr. PH received it in sync with the corresponding visual image.

Mr. Freeman and his colleagues are now looking for ways to slow down PH's hearing ability so that it can match what he sees.