Sunday, February 19, 2012
Researching way to banish synaesthesia as a treatment for autistic hypersensitivity - double bad!
The scary bit is in the last three paragraphs:
Dayton, Lily (2012) The blended senses of synesthesia. Los Angeles Times. February 20th 2012.
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-synesthesia-brain-20120220,0,6760571.story
Some quotes from the article:
"No one is trying to cure synesthesia — ..."
True?
"I think that what they're experiencing is a form of synesthesia where instead of some sense connecting to their color area, it's connecting to an area involving pain or aversion or nausea," Eagleman says. "If that's true, what we're doing in synesthesia will give us an actual molecular target for helping that."
Oh, so they are trying to cure synaesthesia, but only synaesthesia in people who don't identify as synaesthetes. No problem!
It has been years since the Eagleman Lab at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston started researching the genetics of synesthesia. As I have observed a number of years ago at this blog, there can be only one reason why any research team would be so keen to identify the genetics of some variation or condition - eugenics or a "treatment" or a "cure" for something. This story merely confirms something that has been beyond doubt for a long time. It is no coincidence that the Baylor College of Medicine is the same research institution that was at the centre of a controversy in 2006 about a supposed prenatal test for autism: http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/showthread.php?tid=3840&page=1
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4 comments:
""I think that what they're experiencing is a form of synesthesia where instead of some sense connecting to their color area, it's connecting to an area involving pain or aversion or nausea," Eagleman says. "If that's true, what we're doing in synesthesia will give us an actual molecular target for helping that."
Oh, so they are trying to cure synaesthesia, but only synaesthesia in people who don't identify as synaesthetes. No problem!"
Um, no, that statement indicates they're trying to cure a kind of synaesthesia that causes pain. Assuming this is true, I see no problem with that. Most people who experience pain, for whatever reason, would like that pain lessened or removed.
There's not a shred of evidence to back up Eagleman's theory that autistic hypersensitivity has synaesthesia as its basis, while there is a mountain of evidence that it is what autistic and sensitive ppl say it is - an amplification or hypersensitivity of the senses, not phantom pain.
Also, I find it remarkable and quite curious that I can't recall reading about a single case of synaesthesia involving pain, while there is a seemingly endless range of variations of types of synaestesisa being discovered every day - flavoured people, coloured ballet movements, music with shapes, fragrances wth colours, coloured emotions, personalities with temperatures, Hindu castes arranged in a set spatial scheme (like number forms), time units in mind-space etc etc. It's actually a really interesting question as to why synaesthesia apparently never has pain as a concurrent. Eagleman should be 100% aware of this.
Correction - what i meant to write is that synaesthesia seems not to involve pain as a concurrent (unusual triggered experience), but there are many cases in which pain is the iinducer or trigger of synaesthesia. The most common type is probably coloured pain, which I experience. But oddly, I've never experienced pain as the extra sensory experience added by synaesthesia, and I do experience a quite largre number of different types of syn. I find this interesting.
And to go on, in general, I can't think of any types of syn that I experience that have really unpleasant concurrents. Perhaps this is because the intensity of syn varies with different types that I experience, and the more vivid types tend to give nice effects. For some reason synaesthesia concurrents often are visual, the classic type being colours, and just how unpleasant can a visual sensory experience be? Having to look at a duck-shit brown voice isn't going to ruin your day, is it? Hearing such a voice is probably the worse thing, and that is just misfortune, not synaesthesia.
Maybe there are people out there for whom synaesthesia is a predominantly unpleasant or distracting experience. Such people don't seem to be very much represented among the loose community of synaesthetes who openly discuss our experiences.
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