Autism And Synesthesia

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Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and synesthesia are two conditions whose mechanisms are not well known and that have only been studied in detail in the past few decades. Both are relatively prevalent neurological conditions, more common than we thought before (Baird 2006, Simner 2009). ASDs are a range of conditions that impair a person's social communication and interaction and include traits such as repetitive behaviour, narrow interests, and hypo- or hyper- reactivity to sensory input (DSM-5, 2013). Its estimated prevalence is about 1% of the population (Baron-Cohen 2009). Synesthesia describes a wide variety of perceptions wherein an ordinary stimulus activates an unordinary perceptional modality, such as musical notes evoking tastes or …show more content…
For synesthesia especially, there are many different variations of it, leading to multiple proposed mechanisms for each type. A common neural hypothesis is that a synesthete's brain has cross-wiring in specific areas (Ramachandran 2001) and local neural hyper-connectivity (Baron-Cohen 2013), leading to one sensory input invoking another. As for autism, some proposed mechanisms include abnormal cranial connectivity (Barnea-Goraly et al., 2004), and genome-wide studies have found multitudes of genes and mutations associated with ASDs (Anney et al., 2010) as …show more content…
Different studies have found that synesthesia occurs more commonly in people with autism spectrum disorders and that people with synesthesia have more autistic traits than non-synesthetes. With these findings, a number of proposed neural, sensory, and genetic mechanisms have been identified to account for this interconnectivity, such as veridical mapping, atypical sensory sensitivity, and genomic linkage. The study of this can also be extended further to see larger implications of this connection in facets such as savantism. The VM hypothesis for the occurrence of synesthesia in people with ASD is also hypothesized to be in general a reason why savant skills are seemingly so much more prevalent among the ASD population (Bouvet et al. 2014), with a measured rate of almost 30% in a study of 137 participants with ASD's (Howlin et al. 2009). Studies also take it one step further and propose that synesthesia in people with ASD's is a mechanism for savant abilities. Bor et al. (2007) hypothesized that the extreme numerical abilities found in a case patient was due in part to the presence of synesthesia where streams of numbers activated a complex 3D map in his mind (Bor et al. 2007). Therefore, studying connections between autism and synesthesia can also give us insight on savant abilities in people with autism spectrum disorders and also in general help us
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