Possible Synesthesia Autism link validated by Baron-Cohen

Post Reply New Topic

Live Science reprinted by Fox News

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/11/2 ... ee-sounds/

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 28 Nov 2013, 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

its been well known for a long while that synethesia is higher in families with asd in them,am sure it was simon baron cohen that said that a good few years ago.

Here is the link to the original article: People with Autism More Likely to Hear Colors, See Sounds

By Bahar Gholipour, LIVE SCIENCE Staff Writer; posted November 20, 2013 09:31am ET

He's only about ten years behind the autism community in figuring that out.

In other news, water is wet and kittens are cute!

Which puts him 10 years ahead of most of the rest of the neurological and psychological professionals.

Ehh, he's better than most, I'll give you that, but I disagree with him on some points--the extreme male brain theory, for example, which I think is absolute bunk.

While the autistic community has been actively discussing synesthesia, he's been saying:

More discourse that shows that what autistic people know and say don't count until an ~expert~ verifies it.

But you can't use anecdotal evidence to create a scientific theory. So no matter how many people said, "Hey, I'm autistic and I have synesthesia," you would still need to gather a random group of auties, gather a group of random NTs, test for synesthesia, and see if the auties had significantly higher levels of synesthesia.

I think it's fine to say, "Yeah, they've been talking about it for years, but we didn't have scientific proof until now." What's not fine is when the scientists who know how to properly test a hypothesis are sitting in their labs and not even thinking of talking to some autistics to see what ideas their discussions of autism spark. They're giving up a huge opportunity when they don't talk to autistics about autism--they miss our perspective, they don't see what's important to us.

There are quite a few scientists who do prefer to talk to autistic people directly. I remember being part of one study on how autistics learn about romance--yes, seriously, and yes, I participated as an asexual virgin--and the researcher seemed to be quite interested in our perspectives. She was gathering information using a questionnaire rather than doing a true experiment. I think her approach is pretty smart, to start out with. If it weren't for the rather open structure of the study, it would probably have been yet more "autistics have problems with communication", rather than uncovering some very real problems, such as the lack of decent sex ed for autistic teens.

So, yeah, we need proper science, and you can't do that just chatting on an internet forum. But if you try to do proper science to study a group of people, without actually talking to the people in that group, then you aren't doing proper science.

The results of online questionnaire need to be put to test.

But you can point to anecdotal evidence and say "autistic people do seem to talk a lot about synesthesia." The only place I've seen more talk about synesthesia than this forum was an actual synesthesia forum. Anecdotal evidence is evidence, after all. Many studies involve collecting anecdotes from a lot of people and turning them into statistics. For example, studies about how many autistic children are bullied are based on anecdotal evidence and self-report, but this does not make them invalid.

And, really, you can use anecdotal evidence as the starting point of a theory. You just need to follow it up with testing, analysis, and empirical data.



And this is why Simon Baron-Cohen said he didn't think there was any connection, despite the fact that more autistic people having synesthesia is pretty common knowledge at least in online autistic communities (like this forum).



There's a huge difference between "using a forum to do proper science"* and SBC stating that he assumed that one had nothing to do with the other despite the fact that there has been a persistent connection between the two in intra-community discussions among autistic people. Which is why I criticized his statements - because he doesn't seem to acknowledge what autistic people talk about as valid. So even though synesthesia is something autistics experience, and report experiencing at a relatively high rate,that is not even relevant to SBC until he decides to do the research himself. There is something fundamentally wrong with his approach to autistic people when he basically ignores us and relies strictly on his own observations.

* Although you can practice science via a forum, as science is a procedure - the scientific method - which can be used to test most anything one might care to test

Agreed. If there's a lot of anecdotal evidence and you haven't done the research nor read about others' research on the subject, then you shouldn't claim that "there's no connection". You should make a statement like, "No one has researched that yet, so we don't know for sure."

Anecdotal evidence isn't proof, but it's a good way to know where to look--the pawprints left by the facts you're tracking. You can't point to the pawprints and say you've caught the animal, but you'd be unwise to ignore them.