Autism Vox

Really Feeling What You’re Feeling

by Kristina Chew, PhD on December 1st, 2008

Corduroy, velvet, denim. Leather, silk, a rock. Bubble wrap, fake fur, burlap. Not a list of supplies for a craft project, but a list of things with different textures—but if you felt each, with your fingers or on the soles of your feet, would they just be so many sensory sensation? Or might one say “security” to you, or one make you agitated, even angry? Does touching certain textures evoke certain emotions in you?

If so, you may have “tactile-emotion synesthesia.” Synesthesia is an “involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense”; it’s thought to be much more common in the general population than previously thought. Someone with synesthesia might attach certain textures or sounds to numbers or colors, as Daniel Tammet describes in his autobiographical Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant. It’s been found that synesthesia can be auditory (certain sounds are felt, smelled, and so forth).

Here’s today’s Neurophilosophy on work published in the journal Neurocase by researchers at the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego:

In patient AW, a 22-year-old female, the most vivid emotions are evoked by denim, which causes in her strong feelings of depression and disgust, and silk, which produces feelings of happiness and contentment. Other textures evoked a wide variety of emotions and feelings: when she touched corduroy, AW felt confused; leather aroused feelings of receiving criticism; multicoloured toothpaste made her feel anxious; wax made her feel embarrassed; tylenol gel caps made her feel jealous; and different grades of sand paper made her feel either guilt, relief, or as if she was telling a white lie. In patient HS, a 20-year-old female, the same textures often evoked different feelings. She felt no real emotion when touching denim but was disgusted instead by the texture of fleece and wax; corduroy made her feel disappointed; bok choy made her feel irritated, but smooth metal made her feel sedated and calm. In this subject, the strongest emotion was evoked when she touched soft leather, which made her feel extremely scared - she described the sensation as “making my spine crawl.”

Charlie’s always been drawn to things based on color and shape and also—as we later noted—texture. When younger, he seemed to prefer toys (blocks, puzzles, beads) made of wood, rather than plastic (ok sometimes, but much more rarely) and metal (never an interest). As I’ve often noted, he (and we) have become a bit dependent on polarfleece in the form of jackets, vests, gloves, hats, and blankets. Light cotton t-shirts and pants made from some kind of cotton-based material with not too many fasteners are pretty much what Charlie wears day in and day out, along with a dark blue hooded sweatshirt—a long time since we’ve bothered with knit sweaters for him and forget the potential slipperiness of polyester. While Charlie seems quite uninterested in drawing or coloring or painting with a brush, we’ve been noticing that when he can touch the materials—-clay or putty—he’s been quite motivated.

Kind of gives the phrase “how are you feeling” a whole new dimension.

Share This

Related Stories

Today Show Today on Autism and Vaccines
What Do You Expect When You’re Expecting?
“Sometimes the only thing you can do is keep an eye on them”
Can music “mean” like language does?
And the secret is…..

POSTED IN: Sensory, clothes