Synesthesia and Its Associations with Autism, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Detail-oriented Perception

During my Pro Futura fellowship, I am focusing on the link between synesthesia and mental health. Synesthesia is a non-pathological sensory phenomenon where specific stimuli, like letters,sounds or smells, automatically trigger additional sensory experiences, such as color or colored shapes. This condition occurs in approximately 4% of the general population, is associated with enhanced memory and is believed to be an extreme case of associations like they occur in everyone, and that build the fundament of language and cognition. Synesthesia co-occurs with autism and there is preliminary evidence for a co-occurrence with other mental health conditions and alterations in general sensory processing (i.e. sensory hyper-sensitivity or enhanced attention to details).
In my project, I am exploring these associations, both more generally and with specific focus on obsessive-compulsive disorder. For this, I am using twin design methods in combination with behavioral and brain imaging assessments. Monozygotic twins share 100% of their genes and dizygotic twins on average 50%. Hence, by comparing monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs with each other, I am  estimating the heritability of synesthesia and the genetic and environmental contributions to its association with mental health conditions. Comparing measures of sensory perception and brain connectivity between twins where one twin is more synesthetic then the other allows me further to investigate the sensory and neural features linked to synesthesia while implicitly controlling for the genetic and environmental factors shared by the twins.

This will be a hybrid event.

For more information and the webinar link, please see http://www.swedishcollegium.se/subfolders/Events.html.