![]() To what extent do children with synesthesia grow up to become artists and poets? The connection is controversial, in spite of prominent examples such as Nabokov, Asher said it's a misconception that most synesthetes go into creative disciplines. Interventions may include written notes or books on tape for those whose synesthesia interferes with, respectively, listening or reading. As awareness of learning differences grows in schools, more children are coming forward and explaining that they have trouble, leading to more diagnoses, Asher said. ![]() One suggestion is that synesthesia and autism in a single person may make him or her a savant, someone with a singular and extreme intellectual ability.Ĭhildren with synesthesia will often show signs of it in school, because it slows down reading for some kids and makes lectures difficult to absorb for others. In fact, in this sense, synesthesia is a form of photographic memory. The man's ability to focus intently on a dry subject is associated with Asperger's, but it's also synesthesia that helps him memorize numbers, Asher said. "He says it's like walking along a path," Asher said. Instead, it is as though he were navigating a landscape, Asher said. The man's process of remembering these numbers is not simple rote recall. In fact, he memorized 22,000 digits of the number pi. The man he examined had Asperger's syndrome - a mild, high-functioning form of autism - and also had an extraordinary memory capacity for numbers. The link between synesthesia and autism is controversial and speculative, but one of Asher's previous case studies suggests a connection. For example, genes on chromosome 2 have also been linked to autism, Asher said. Genes found in the areas of Asher's study have been connected to other mental disorders. In other words, people with synesthesia may have brain connections that would normally disappear at an early age. Given that a normal infant's brain has excess connections between brain regions, one hypothesis is that synesthesia results when the genes that "prune" these connections away are mutated, Ramachandran said. Nunn at Goldsmiths College, London, which found that the visual areas of the brain were activated in response to sound in people for whom sound triggers color. "Cross-wiring" was shown in a study led by J.A. "Nobody really had the evidence pinning it down to specific genes in specific chromosomes, and I'm delighted to hear somebody's done that," Ramachandran said. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego. "It means that the genetics of synesthesia are much more complex than we thought," Asher said.īrain scans have shown that people with synesthesia seem to have "cross-wiring" between brain regions, said Dr.
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