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Synesthesia is a phenomenon where stimulation of one sense triggers an involuntary experience in a different sense, such as seeing sounds or tasting colors. A recent study found a potential connection between synesthesia and autism. Synesthesia was previously thought to be a rare curiosity, but the link to autism could provide insight into both conditions. Baron-Cohen's research in the 1980s was pivotal in establishing synesthesia as a real neurological phenomenon, showing brain activation in response to sounds without visual stimuli. Both autism and synesthesia involve atypical sensory perception and difficulties filtering stimuli. Exploring their relationship could help develop new diagnostic tools and treatments for autism.

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49 views3 pages

Chemreadingproject

Synesthesia is a phenomenon where stimulation of one sense triggers an involuntary experience in a different sense, such as seeing sounds or tasting colors. A recent study found a potential connection between synesthesia and autism. Synesthesia was previously thought to be a rare curiosity, but the link to autism could provide insight into both conditions. Baron-Cohen's research in the 1980s was pivotal in establishing synesthesia as a real neurological phenomenon, showing brain activation in response to sounds without visual stimuli. Both autism and synesthesia involve atypical sensory perception and difficulties filtering stimuli. Exploring their relationship could help develop new diagnostic tools and treatments for autism.

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© © All Rights Reserved
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Picturing the scene in your head: while reading newspaper, all the words showing up in

front of your eyes are composed of not only letters but also colors, shapes, sounds and smells.
Isnt that cool? Obviously, this dramatic effect is not magic; it is actually resulted from a physical
phenomenon called Synesthesia, the mixing of the senses.
According to the article True Colors: Synesthesia and Autism published on Todays
Science, Synesthesia is generally considered as an unusual ability that causes stimuli such as
sounds, colors or smells to trigger additional sensory responses. Therefore, synesthetes might be
able to sense incredible sights, like sounds come in particular colors and letters have
different smells. Interestingly, a recent study in the Journal of Molecular Autism offers a new
theory on the possible connection between synesthesia and autism, which is on the contrary of
the old theory that Synesthesia was mostly consigned to neuroscience's cabinet of curiosities
along with other bits of trivia of the "fun fact" variety, such as out-of-body experiences or lucid
dreams. The plausible link between Synesthesia and autism would be helpful to provide
valuable evidence to understand and explain the complicated mental disorder, autism.
As we know, scientists have already identified approximately sixty different kinds of
synesthesia, including the most frequent ones like numbers or letters being linked to colors,
numbers appearing in a mental map, sounds evoking colors, and the least frequent ones like
numbers or months or letters arranged in a certain sequences. In the past several decades,
numerous scientists have done hundreds of researches on synesthesia; however, most of their
conclusions were contradictory to each other without very few valuable achievements.
Finally, a decisive outbreak on the study of Synesthesia was reached and conquered by a
great scientist called Baron-Cohen. After an extensive investigation of synesthesia in his own
lab, Baron-Cohen developed a possible explanation for the plausible way of hyper-connectivity
in the brain during early development that could result in synesthetic experience. In 1987, his
team successfully confirmed and proved the consistency of an individual's synesthetic
experiences across time. In later studies, they furtherly confirmed the "reality" of this
phenomenon on the neurological level, with the help of brain imaging technology, by showing

that the visual areas of the brain in sound-color synesthetes would get activated in response to
sound even though no actual visual stimuli were presented.
In addition to his study on synesthesia, Baron-Cohen has also investigated autism, a
complicated developmental disorder first recognized by Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist
Leo Kanner in 1943. While individual cases on the "autism spectrum" vary in severity, most
Synesthesia and patient all have three traits in common: problems with communication, social
difficulties and repetitive behaviors.
The similarities between Synesthesia and Autism could also be shown in many other fields.
For example, both of them involve deviations from the norm in terms of sensory perception (in
sensory perceptionan area that's clearly different for synesthetes and, as it turns out, is also
affected in cases of autism). Previous research had shown that autistic individuals are especially
sensitive to sensory stimuli and often cannot tolerate particular sounds, smells, textures or colors.
The patients have trouble filtering background sensations from their own, which often causes
them to experience "sensory overload as well. Furthermore, past studies by David Eagleman
had suggested about the direct connection between the sensory processing difficulties typically
experienced by autistic individuals and the sensory processes characteristic of synesthesia.
The further studies on the way autistic and synesthetic brain works can greatly help
scientists to develop new diagnostic procedures and treatments for autism, at a time when the
condition seems to be far more prevalent than it was once. The reason to explain this strange
condition still remains as a mystery, but these new approaches may also turn on the lights one by
one in the darkness.
My partner, Wesley Yang, and I choose to work on this article because I just finish reading a
book relating to children with autism disorders for English class, which is called The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I also watched a BBC documentary that illustrate the
talents of several autism patients, which are all related to Synesthesia. I found it very interesting
to see the connection between Autism and Synesthesia; for example, a autism patient is really
talented in math because the numbers in his head have different shapes, and he can do

calculations in a really short time as he only need to match the shape together to find out the
answer. I would like to know more about this kind of cool link between physical and mental
disorder, and this article does help me a lot.

Bibliography
Poltorak, Katya. True Colors: Synesthesia and Autism. Today's Science. Infobase
Learning,
Jan.
2014.
Web.
1
Mar.
2015.
http://tsof.infobaselearning.com/recordurl.aspx?wid=19152&ID=29447

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