Alli Hart, Peter Krusing, Will Sloss In terms of sheer symptomatic similarities between mental disorders like anxiety

or autism-spectrum disorders and synesthesia, both can elicit feelings of sensory overload as a result of reduced sensorimotor gating. One experiment done by Gimmstead in 2011 used the eyeblink reflex, which had in past experiments (on people not affected by either synesthesia or mental disorders) shown that being presented with a negative visual stimulus elicited more eyeblinking than a positive one. If, Gimmstead postulated, synesthetes being shown a colored grapheme that didnt fit with their mental association of the two caused more eye-blinking, it would confirm that the incongruency of sense association is negative for the synesthete. A parallel experiment Gimmstead drew from (by Paulsen and Lang, 2006) said that pupil dilation is a sign of increased load of stimuli taxing the brains information processing systems, and that synesthetes experienced this also when presented with an incongruent color-grapheme. Both these experiments in tandem would seem to prove that when reality interferes with a synesthetes perspective of it, the reaction is both negative and mentally taxing, just as it is for the aforementioned mental disorders (Gimmstead). While synesthesia itself has no ubiquitous definition and instead is a spectrum of types: associator (only having a minds eye concept of the triggered sense), projector chromagraphemic (physically experiencing the triggered sense, but also understanding that it isnt associated with reality), and projector (physically experiencing the triggered sense and believing its real) (Emerson). Technically, the last category could be classified as a psychotic disorder because hallucinations are false perceptions (ALLPSYCH). Is this form of synesthesia laden with a degree of sensorimotor gating issues and negative affect comparable to those mental disorders are associated with (Gimmstead), however? Memory expert and synesthete Solomon Shereshevskii spoke of sound -> color synesthesia that seemed to affect his communication with people: it was as though a flame with fibers protruding from his voice was advancing toward

Alli Hart, Peter Krusing, Will Sloss meI couldnt follow what he was saying, Shereshevskii said of speaking to someone; he also commented that the sensation made it more difficult to hear someone speaking who interrupted or spoke directly after another whose voice triggered color. James Wannerton, when asked to speak about his synesthesia with Fox News, said that certain words triggered tastes to the point that he could hardly bear to say his girlfriends name, which conjured a negative texture (Gimmstead). The key to actually qualifying as a mental disorder in DSM-IV terms would require both sensory flooding and cognitive confusion, that produces a consistent negative life impact, though, as said in the dissertation of a study showing that people react more positively to jarring sense stimuli when its preceded by softer stimuli, whose addition was called prepulse inhibition (Braff). The study showed that ones ability to react less aversely when prepulse inhibition was enacted has a direct correlation to his/her sensorimotor gating abilities. Thus, because as increasing the intensity of a stimulus almost always increases the intensity of a synesthetic sense (Ramachandran, Brang), and assuming based on the previous experiment that synesthetes do in fact have reduced sensorimotor abilities, the implication would be that no matter the environment surrounding a jarring stimuli, synesthetes would consistently react negatively. Although many synesthetes are simply not disaffected or overwhelmed by their condition, at least according to anecdotal evidence (Gimmstead), adding up the evidence from these experiments shows that the affected ones (presumably, those with the most sensorimotor gating issues) would be consistently influenced regardless of the situation. The DSM-IV quantifies a consistent negative influence on daily life as one of the indicators of a mental disorder; the severity of a conditions impact, as determined in its Axis V: Highest Level of Functioning, helps determine whether or not its a disorder (ALLPSYCH).

Alli Hart, Peter Krusing, Will Sloss "ALLPSYCH Online." Psychology Classroom at AllPsych Online. AllPsych and Heffner Media Group, Inc., 15 May 2004. Web. 10 Nov. 2011. <http://allpsych.com/>. Braff, D. L., Geyer, M. A., & Swerdlow, N. R. (2001). Human studies of prepulse inhibition of startle: Normal subjects, patient groups, and pharmacological studies. Psychopharmacology, 156, 234-258. Emerson, Lisa. "Mixed Signals - about Synesthesia." Mixed Signals - Synesthesia Online. 2002. Web. 10 Nov. 2011. <http://mixsig.net/about/index.php>. Gimmstead, Katherine. "Assessment of Transient Negative Affect in Synesthesia." University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, Missouri, 2011. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and David Brang (2008) Synesthesia. Scholarpedia, 3(6):3981.