Everything Feels As I See It — Synesthesia In Autism
by Eric E. Cane
It’s hard to describe, but it is also one of the reasons I have a certain detailed recall for motion, for details I’ve seen but didn’t realize until later — sometimes decades later — when I recall them and feel what I saw. My sense of touch is interwoven with my vision.
I’ve told close friends before, there’s a place in my brain where I just feel the things I see. Images have a presence in my head that are not just visual. It’s why at times in restaurants where there is sun or light reflections and lots of people moving around, lots of textures, I have to look down or close my eyes to not max out the pressure being felt in my head.
As a writer, it can certainly come in handy when recalling experiences. I can recall the fire from a pot bellied stove from my childhood and in the present actually feel the heat on my face and neck, the drying of my eyes, the smell of the ash under the burning wood embers, the coolness on my ears and back of neck that weren’t exposed to it.
When I watch people move about me in a restaurant, for example, I feel them in my head as shapes that pass from one part of my brain to another. It’s an actual pressure-feeling, a presence related to their movement through my awareness. This can be fatiguing under certain conditions. One is stress. No big surprise there. Many sensory details can ramp up to overwhelming when under varying types of stress.
The other is focus. If I can focus on specific details (I’ve been training myself to do this since I was a child), I can help drown out other sensory detail. But the success of this purposeful attention is also affected by stress.
When resources are low through fatigue, changes in my environment, living conditions, or relationships — and even for reasons I don’t know or understand yet — the ability to tune my focus is challenged or nonexistent. In times like that, the mind and body wants to just shut down, close off the stimuli and recover.
The one thing that doesn’t go away in all this is the pressure-feeling of what I am experiencing through sight. If I try to take in all the movement sensations at once, I get overwhelmed. It’s there in my head still being experienced, as when I am driving and feel the trees, houses, cars, clouds, the road, the lines, patterns, etc. moving past, but I can most often focus on only a few things, shift them to prominence so to speak and not have issues.
It might be the reason you’ll see my eyes not exactly focused or looking where someone else might be expecting while in conversation (I think this may also play out in other autistics as well). The scene is already captured in my head and I’m either recalling the visual feeling in my head, analyzing it in my way, or I’m trying to narrow my focus on the sound of the person’s voice, peripheral body movements, scent, warmth, breathing patterns and the like to avoid excessive “visual-pressure”.
I’m a little exhausted writing about it, as I have so much visual-pressure going on in my head recalling these things. It took a long time for me to write about this, to be able to put into words something that I hope others might be able to understand. I’ve got a lot of other documents on my computer where I ran through many ways of detailing this for you. Even did hand-written notes to try to narrow down the concepts. All my background work on this has made me realize how much I experience in my head — all the sensory influx I have to deal with and don’t even think about, as it’s been my experience all my life.
Another thing that I’ve written in poetry before is directly related to how music physically “feels” in my brain. Music that always stood out to me was Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Prelude and Fugue №2 and Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The notes step wonderfully through my mind.
We humans are diversely interesting, surprising, and when we stop to analyze ourselves enough to write for others, perhaps even a little enlightening.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please clap and share if you’d like more of this kind of writing.
Thought I’d include some information based on studies done.
- A study by Baron-Cohen et al. found that synesthesia was present in 22% of autistic individuals compared to 4% of neurotypical controls.
- A meta-analysis by Robertson and Simmons confirmed a significantly higher prevalence of synesthesia in individuals with ASD (14.6%) than in the general population (4.4%).
