Super colour vision

Grapheme-colour synesthesia is a form of synesthesia. Inflicted individuals involuntarily associate specific colours with shapes, sounds, letters, tastes, numbers, words or personalities.

When people with grapheme-colour synesthesia rub their eyes, their vision explodes with colourful stars, swirls & sparks. While everybody experiences phosphenes (the colours behind your eyelids), those with this specific synesthesia have increased colour perception synapses in the brain. Typically brains will trim excess synapses to reduce overcrowding, but in some conditions such as autism, this doesn’t happen. This can lead to excessive growth of ‘abnormal’ neural pathways, making sensory signals interact in unique ways.

Neuroscience shows that brains differ in the way they prune and strengthen synaptic pathways. In autism, synaptic pruning is reduced, leaving a denser web of neural connections. 

This means more information is taken in, more comparisons are made, and more possibilities are calculated in real time. A mind capable of generating rapid ideas, testing countless scenarios, and perceiving risks invisible to others is a highly valuable asset.

However, the synaptic density that grants this clarity also incapacitates. The busier my environment is, the more raw information is flooding my processors. In each brain there exists a neural network (salience network) whose job it is to direct incoming sensory information in order of importance. 

Along with more information, autistic brains also have a hyperconnected salience network. This means more lanes and exits on the neural highway for information to go through. Essentially, means that sensory information is going through parts of the brain it doesn’t need to, triggering excess brain activity. This causes mistakes to be made in identifying the importance of each signal. 

My brain tells me to focus on an irrelevant background noise and completely disregards that important social cue I just missed. This is known as ‘atypical attention allocation’ where incoming sensory data is mislabeled, misdirected and atypically prioritised. In short, my brain is a series of interconnected highways that is really hard to navigate and really easy to make a wrong turn in.