Day 86

According to Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism, people with autism are susceptible to a variety of neurological phenomena, such as synaesthesia (two or more senses that are connected), Epilepsy, Tourette's, and perfect musical pitch. For example, people with autism with word-color associative brains have been placed in PET chambers, where they listened to a series of words. Even though there were no visual cues, the language and visual centers of their brain lit up, which suggests a connection between the two areas.

Why does this not happen to everyone?

"In the first two years of life, the human brain forms neural connections at a furious rate; many of the neural pathways are useless or irrelevant, products of the bewildering flood of data coming into an infant brain at the tremendous rate of physical growth inside the cranium. Between the ages of two and three, the number of neurons in the brain shrink. As useful pathways are established 'neural pruning' disposes of redundant and illogical ones - including neural pathways connecting what should be disparate senses. Before pruning, we may all be synaesthetic. In synaesthesia, and in other phenomena such as perfect pitch and Tourette's, some of this neural pruning might not be occurring"
(2004, p. 138).