Where does all that synesthesia and thinking in pictures come from?

When you see an object, it seems you see it as an entire thing first and only afterwards do its details follow on, but for me, the details jump straight out first of all and then gradually, detail by detail, the whole image floats up into focus.

…

My eyes are captured by lines and surfaces. just to get a grip on things, I have to scan my memory to find an experience closest to what’s happening now.

….

Every single thing has its own unique beauty. when a color is vivid or a shape is eye catching, them my heart kind of drowns in it and I can’t concentrate on anything else. A person who is looking at a mountain far away doesn’t notice the prettiness of the dandelion in front of them.

Three quotes from the voiceover of the movie The Reason I Jump, attributed to Naoki Higashida, an autistic man credited with writing the book by the same name, who communicates via facilitated communication.

One thing that lends The Reason I Jump its aura of truthiness—an aura so strong that it overcomes belief-straining videos like this one—are quotes like these. Such testimonials seem particularly convincing in light of similar testimonials from other non-speaking individuals with autism:

I could be waiting behind a shadow listening to a story in red and green, when I would be interrupted by a real voice made of sound, thus dissolving the story of red and green.

…

I could focus all my attention on only one sense, and that is hearing.. I was too young and uninformed in science to analyze the sensory battle that was taking place within my nervous system. It just meant that my colors would disappear if there were sounds vibrating around me.

Attributed to Tito Mukhopadhyay, a non-speaking man with autism who is facilitated by his mother (Soma Mukhopadhyay, the inventor of the Rapid Prompting Method of facilitated communication).

Our brains are wired differently. We take in many sounds and conversations at once. I take over a thousand pictures of a person's face when I look at them. That's why we have a hard time looking at people. I have learned how to filter through some of the mess.

Attributed to Carly Fleischmann, a non-speaking woman with autism.

My senses always fall in love / they spin, swoon/ they lose themselves in one another’s arms / your senses live alone like bachelors / like bitter, slanted rhymes whose marriage is a sham.

Attributed to Deej, a non-speaking man with autism.

If these messages are indeed—as we believe them to be—elicited through facilitated communication, how is it that multiple facilitators are converging on similar notions of the sensory experience in autism? Notions, that is, of sensory hyper-specificity and fragmentation, combined with an exotic intermingling of the different senses and/or an overall sensory disorganization.

Some of this convergence may reflect a need that is common to many facilitators: the need to explain, at least subconsciously to themselves, how the person they’re facilitating can seem so tuned out and distracted while having so much to say about the broader world.

But part of if, I suspect, comes from a set of memes that have spread from certain first-hand accounts of autism: accounts whose authorship, unlike that of the above testimonials, is not in doubt. I’m thinking of Asperger’s memoirs like Donna Williams’ Nobody Nowhere, Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures, and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day. There are dozens of Asperger’s memoirs out there (I’ve just done a survey), but these are among the best selling.

Most Asperger’s memoirs focus on social challenges; many also discuss obsessive interests, sensory sensitivities, and problems with sensory overload. But their most interesting, compelling material lies in the personal stories they tell. For example, we have John Elder Robison’s account, in Look Me in the Eye, of pranks like hanging a department store dummy from an electric tower above a gigantic burning pentagram in the middle of the night and, later, designing special-effects guitars for KISS.

But Thinking in Pictures and Born on a Blue Day offer something else that many people find at least as compelling—something that feeds the world’s abiding urge to fetishize autism; to see it as some combination of magical powers and exotic ways of being. 

Temple Grandin’s magic and exoticism is embedded in her memoir’s title. “I think in pictures,” read the opening lines, “I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head.” Grandin also discusses having a mental rolodex of vivid images that contain exemplars for all the nouns in her vocabulary. Under the heading “dog” she can flip through all the dogs she’s ever seen; under the subheading Great Dane, all the Great Danes she’s ever known.

Daniel Tammet’s title, “Born on a Blue Day”, similarly evokes what’s exotic and magical about him. Open the book and you see it elaborated on the book jacket: “Daniel Tammet sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head.”

Besides Grandin’s vivid images and Tammet’s synthesia, there are Donna Williams’ accounts of her heightened and fractured senses. In Nobody Nowhere we read about the tiny whips and spots that haunt her bedroom at night, which she attributes to having vision so acute that she detects air particles. In more recent blog posts, Williams tells of her various agnosias: “simultagnosia” (context blindness); “associative agnosia" (why she confuses the garlic crusher and the can opener and can’t tell that two people are talking to each other); and “integrative agnosia”, which she also calls “mono-channeling” (why she can’t combine distinct sensory channels into a whole).

These accounts, I suspect, vary in their reliability and accuracy, but what matters is that many people are intrigued enough to be reading them—and intrigued enough for these exotic notions of autism to spread into the broader autism universe. The most infectious memes—the synesthesia, the accumulation of hundreds of specific images, the mono-channeling, the seemingly out-of-nowhere savant skills—will reach parents and other facilitators and will subtly influence how they, in turn, influence the extended index fingers of the autistic individuals they facilitate.

This, despite the fact that, if the authentic autism memoirs (not to mention the accumulating science of autism) are to be believed, most of these sensory phenomena (along with the out-of-nowhere savantism) are not generally characteristic of the autism experience.

Of course, that’s not to say that the autism experience isn’t full of compelling phenomena. It’s just that many people are looking in precisely the wrong places.