A synaesthesia-like effect is a part of the charm of a little kids' picture book

I've noticed something interesting in a children's picture book - Mr Pod and Mr Piccalilli by Penny Dolan and Nick Sharratt. It's a sweet story with nice illustrations that has been featured on Play School on ABCTV. Have a look at the picture (on page 4?) that shows Mr Pod and Mr Piccallili relaxing in their different sitting rooms in their flats. Both characters have cats who have names that rhyme with their surnames - Pod and Tod and Piccallili with Millie, and they also have sitting rooms with a decor in a style that in some hard-to-define but obvious way suits their surnames. Have a look yourself if you can access a copy of this book. There is a correspondence between the sound of the names and the shapes in the decors (and the shapes of the characters).

The effect in this book is just like the so-called "bouba-kiki effect" that has been researched and publicized by synaesthesia researchers V. S. Ramachandran and Ed Hubbard. Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman have done some research on this type of effect with autistic study subjects (and a control group). They have apparently found that autistic subjects show an impairment in "the bouba/kiki task". They have argued that this might show that the so-called mirror-neurons in autistic people do not work properly. I can easily think of an alternative explanation of why autistic subjects might not respond to "the bouba-kiki task" in the way typical of non-autistic subjects. The bouba-kiki effect follows no known system of logic - there is no logical, objective rule for matching sounds with shapes. This effect is the result of subjective, creative type thinking. It is this lack of logic that makes this effect similar to synaesthesia, we know something odd, something different to the normal processes of rational thinking is going on when people insist that (in their own mind) a specific colour corresponds with a specific letter of the alphabet, or a specific name corresponds with furniture of a certain shape. Synaesthesia is the most subjective way of thinking that I know of. Most, if not all, synaesthetes recognize that our quirky associations only apply to us individually - we know these are not observations about the world outside of our minds. There is no social convention that the letter S is navy blue coloured. We also realise that there is probably no other synaesthete in the world who's synaesthesia associations are exactly the same as ours. It is a truism that many autistic people prefer to devote our energies to work or pastimes that are objective, logical and rule-based in nature. Autistic people like to deal with stuff that could be described as the opposite of synaesthesia. I would argue that this does not necessarily indicate any deficit in other ways of thinking, this could simply be a conscious or unconscious strategy to avoid situations in which conflict or interaction with other people might arise. Are there acromonious debates, personality cults and bitter factionalism in rule-based, logical academic disciplines such as engineering or mathematics? If there are, I've never heard of them. These unpleasant things can be found in the world of psychology, a more subjective and less rule-based academic discipline (evolutionary biology has also had some pretty lively moments). Would you expect a person who prefers to limit their thinking or communication to logical, factual and rule-based areas to give the "correct" answer to any bouba-kiki test? Of course you wouldn't, silly.

I wonder how the researchers that I have mentioned would explain the fact that I have been able to identify an effect that is much the same as the bouba-kiki effect in a kids' picture book. Might they suggest that I am really not autistic, or might they suggest that my synaesthesia has compensated for any autistic bouba/kiki deficit that I might otherwise have suffered from? This is where their ideas fail to make sense - if failure at "the bouba-kiki task" is a sign of a central feature of autism, and at the same time synaesthesia is similar to or the same as the neurological process that enables people to succeed at " the bouba-kiki task", then it should surely be impossible for any person to have both synaesthesia and autism at the same time. But many people do. People like me. People like Daniel Tammet. People like the late Syd Barrett. I am a problem for many people, and it is most amusing to know that my very existence is a problem for Professor Vilayanur S. Ramachandran.

Link to page for Mr Pod and Mr Piccallili at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mr-Pod-Piccalilli-Penny-Dolan/dp/0744540666

Link to Wikipedia page about the bouba-kiki effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

Link to Wikipedia page about Synaesthesia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

Link to research by Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman about Autism and the bouba/kiki effect:
http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~lshenk/boubakiki.pdf