To be honest, the whole of my life has felt like one giant participatory science project, though I’m not actually “a scientist”, a statement that does its best to reflect a most particular and extremely hardwired approach to life that is “mine” and which extends back to my earliest attempts to systemise and make sense of a highly perplexing world. I don’t just lie on my back watching life happen; I make constant notes, comparisons, studies of it all and always have.

From that perspective, the last few weeks have provided me with some extremely fascinating data, mainly because of their extreme contrast with what I had come to know as “normality” for most of my recent life. Because (to recap for anyone who is not a regular reader), for what has been almost 6 weeks now, I have been living in the middle of nowhere, somewhere so quiet and, at night, pitch dark that it couldn’t be more different to where I was living before in a typical urban setting.

Then, just as I had got used to that, and in the way of all good science (though this was not by design), I provided some contrast by staying somewhere much more akin to my old normal, in an urban house fully wired for smart tech (though, to be honest, my own house has never been “smart” due to my EMF aversion), a blue-tone streetlight creating a strong box-shaped light frame around the bedroom window and a movement-activated light that came on several times in the night just outside the bedroom door. Immediately the other side of my door was a work-from-home desk area so wired-up it was jokingly referred to as “mission control” by our host.

To add to the sensory fun, the weekend turned out to be highly “active” in terms of space weather, something I have often talked about in this blog…though I long-ago ceased mentioning this to people in real life due to having grown excessively weary of the cynically raised eyebrows that would generally greet any attempt to explain my high-sensitivity to this phenomena. However, to recap, I am extremely sensitive to solar flares and geomagnetic storms, which often generate effects such as migraine, skin crawling or tingling sensations, various stomach ails, visual aura, worsened tinnitus and so on. So all in all, it was a “fun” weekend from the point of view of my particular environmental sensitivities and comparing them with how much improved I have been lately.

Overnight where we were staying, though I was exhausted from more than my usual social interaction, and though technically I did “sleep” most of the time, I never actually felt as though I was truly asleep at all, like I was lucid dreaming…always fully aware that I was concertedly trying to sleep rather than surrendered to it (much like the old days)…plus the visual effect “inside my head” was as though someone had left all the lights on inside my cranium. I can only assume my cortex was feeling highly overstimulated! When awake, my visual field was full of pinprick lights formed in grid like designs, regardless of whether or not I had my eyes open, although the room itself was particularly dense with them, like a sort of energy “smog” or like looking down at a well-lit city from a Boeing 737. I had occasional bright flashes to my peripheral vision when I moved my eyes in their sockets and all of my skin felt prickly, activated, slightly uncomfortable. My stomach was so worked up it felt as though I was ravenously hungry at 3am, rumbling away, though I knew from experience I was not; this was a classic excitatory effect to the lining of my gut that I’ve experienced countless times before. I was also hypersensitive to smell, as so often happens during these migrainy episodes, being much more triggered than normal by a fairly typical soap-powder aroma on the bed sheets. Thankfully, though a headache was always threatening to happen, it never quite got there other than some occipital tension (I long ago discovered that my version of migraine doesn’t have to include an actual headache). My tinnitus was extremely loud and intense all night, honed into a tone that possessed far more insistence and urgency than my usual background ringing.

It occurred to me as I lay there next morning, and not for the first time, that these effects often feel as though they are an iteration of the synaesthesia that I have had all my life and which I have written about several times before. As in, it’s as though my extreme sensory awareness, lacking the appropriate tools to convey to me exactly whatever important thing is going on in my environment, is forced to intermingle all the usual sensory effects of sight, sound and touch, even smell, to create hybrids that together paint a much bigger, far more multidimensional, picture of “something happening”. Its like being in a fully immersive cinema experience compared to the usual 2-D performance.

Whereas a cold wind might simply convey itself as a feeling of cold on the skin, these harder-to-convey environmentals seemed to recruit almost everything at their disposal to tell me they are happening. Sometimes, when I am in one of these sensory episodes relating to unseen natural phenomena during the night, the light effects in my visual field are stunningly beautiful, like watching northern lights form waves of coloured patterns before my very eyes (somebody on a forum I found also reported that their “visual migraines are quite beautiful – even as they are debilitating – coloured auras” and also mentions that she feels the sensation of large movement even though she is quite still, which is an experience I have also frequently had with respect to geomagnetic storms occurring hundreds of miles away, almost as though I am riding on them). Once or twice in the past, these effects have been so intense that I have wondered if I am having a mini stroke. However, when my visual effects are induced by exposure to manmade EMF, they are, on the contrary, much more like hard grids of pin-lights or randomised visual snow. In either case, the tinnitus intensity can feel as though there is no escaping it and no ignoring it as I am usually quite adept at doing from long practice; these tones are invasive and take over the field of my awareness with their insistence, which can make for a long night.

So, perhaps for the first time (or maybe this was just the first time I actually received an answer when asking the question…) I googled whether there was a link between migraine or tinnitus with synaesthesia, as these seemed to be a good starting point. To my excitement, this time, I received a few responses and here’s some of what I found:

“Sensory processing disorders are often synonymous with synaesthesia. We think that tinnitus in some ways is a synaesthetic condition. If you change the visual input significantly, you can tune the sound out in the hearing for around 60 per cent of people. It’s a synaesthetic effect that probably hasn’t been recognised as one.” (The Surprising World of Synaesthsia – The British Psychological Society).

(Interesting that they should only mention visual input as I suspect I get the synaesthesia affect just as much from a tactile input; more on that below.)

I also found this link with migraine:

“The immune hypothesis of synesthesia links synesthesia to immune-related conditions such as migraine. More specifically, migraine with aura may be linked to grapheme-color synesthesia as both involve cortical hyperexcitability.” (Migraine in Synesthetes and Nonsynesthetes: A Prevalence Study – Jonas & Hibbard.)

That particular study flagged up that certain types of synesthetic inducer (non-linguistic visual experiences, scent, taste, emotion and personality) were associated with visual disturbances in headache among female participants and that touch was associated with migraine with aura. Neural hyperexcitability is something I have long been prone to (and worked hard to mitigate via diet and amino acid supplements), often writing about it in this space; also something which is very strongly associated with autism. I am of the opinion that it is a “felt” sense (touch) that translates into the colour and light effects (possibly also the intense sound) that I experience when strong geomagnetic effects happen in my environment; effects where the limited language of skin is presumably insufficient to convey the sheer enormity of what I am experiencing. Sometimes, objects take on particular colour auras during these episodes (an ability to see auras is associated with synesthesia, known unsurprisingly as “aura synesthesia“). Often it begins with skin tingles or crawling sensations but its as though that alone is far too simplistic to convey the intensity, or complexity, of the changes I am registering in the environment, so maybe the synaesthetic effects are an extension of the usual sensory communication methods, required by my brain to make better sense of the exposure. It wants to know more…and synaesthesia delivers more…so that I can be in no doubt that I had an experience beyond the normal.

Yet the synaesthesia factor doesn’t seem quite enough to explain the degree of my sensitivity to EMF and space weather factors. Yes, they help to explain the means of conveyance, the “tools” by which unseeable forces make themselves known to me, but this doesn’t explain the reason why.

Of course, hypervigilance is likely a fair excuse: after all, both autistic and highly sensitive individuals (I am both) are known to be “wired” for hypervigilance. The theory from Elaine Aron (renowned expert on high sensitivity) is that we Highly Sensitive People are the outliers, the members of the tribe designed to stand on the edges of society and be watchful; always poised to alert everyone else to danger, offering an important evolutionary advantage in times gone by when such skills were not only appreciated but highly necessary to group survival (now we’ve apparently outsourced this role to other agencies). In other words, some of us are naturally designed to pick up on changes in environment that might be a threat and those of us born with this hard-wiring picked up the short straw in an era when our abilities are universally unappreciated and likely disbelieved.

There still feels like there is more to it: I wasn’t always sensitive to space weather or EMF and though the latter could be partially explained by the fact that modern living has vastly increased levels of EMF in the average domestic environment over the last few years compared to, say, 20 or 30 years ago when I was a young adult (so, a problem of adaptation?), it doesn’t fully explain how I have always been highly sensitive to, say, light pollution or other exposures that stimulate. Most people seem to tolerate these things as part of normality whereas I quickly reach thresholds where the excitotoxic effect of manmade origin EMF sends my system into crash-mode; not quite to the degree where strobe lights trigger epilepsy but certainly with some very dire effects on my health if I over-expose. Meanwhile, “normal” people seem to be happily oblivious to solar storms and the like although, with typical-of-me diligence, I have collected countless anecdotes of times when the severe migraines or sudden episode of brain fog my friends and family have complained of just “happened” to coincide with such space events. In fact my daughter, who lives in a completely different part of the country to me, reported having had a very similar day with pre-migraine and intense brain fog just yesterday when I was going through all of this, so a case of shared gene pool or are these effects more common than most people realise or are accustomed to paying attention to?

I’ve often wondered, when trying to fathom why or when this change in me happened (since my space weather sensitivity only became noticeable in 2012 and my acute sensitivity to EMF began quite abruptly in 2015), was it that several years of chronic illness by then (fibromyalgia and ME since 2006) had induced such boredom in my brain that it was encouraged to focus attention on unseen factors as the latest “subject” of my tendency to hyperfocus on pet topics? Did this unwitting focus cause me to develop skills in noticing environmental effects that other people are mostly oblivious to? Had catatonic boredom driven my brain to make a special study of these unseeable variables in my environment and recruit whatever means it had at its disposal (synaesthesia) in order to demonstrate to me when such environmentals were at play, like a home-rigged early warning system?

It’s an interesting question, not least because I immediately found some possible answers in a study entitled “Initial Evidence for Increased Weather Salience in Autism Spectrum Conditions” (Mathew J Bolton et al). This caught my attention for another reason: I was, of course, familiar with the term “salience” in the context of autism but had never heard it used in tandem with the word “weather”. Could this be the appropriate descriptor of this (dubious) “skill” I seem to have acquired for noticing environmental effects that leave other people wondering what on earth I am talking about? Do I have “weather salience” and, for that matter, “EMF salience”? It sounds a lot better than being “some sort of weirdo imagining they can feel/see things that nobody else can feel or see”!

The study I refer to points out that, thus far, “only hypotheses suggesting that autistic individuals might exhibit greater levels of physiological and psychological weather sensitivity when compared with nonautistic individuals have been put forward (Bolton et al. 2017). “ It therefore sets about properly examining and then discussing a possible relationships between weather salience and autism, with the aim of increasing neurodiverse accessibility to future weather-warning services by better understanding such peoples needs. It then goes on to discuss a well-supported characteristic and strength of autism, the tendency to “systemise” information (which echoes what I said right at the very start of this post: that I have spent a lifetime building systems out of experience to try and make sense of my world) since autistic people are known to be stronger in this skillset than the general population. The paper describes this trait as having “the drive and ability to identify and formulate psychological systems, which are sets of logical rules one uses to explain the workings of the physical world”. I guess you could say I am striving to do that right now as I tackle the topics of this post…

This leaning results in the way that autistic people often become “highly passionate for, and possibly develop specialised knowledge in, ‘special interests’” and it turns out weather is a very common area of interest to autistic individuals, according to anecdotal sources and quite a few pieces of research referred to in the paper. So how on earth do you systemise the weather, given its extreme unpredictability (especially where sudden solar events are concerned)? Well, you may repeatedly ask about it, or check up what is meant to be happening on various predictive services, perhaps even multiple times a day or you may diligently observe patterns…perhaps even the most subtle patterns, especially if those patterns flag-up a actual changes or even pain in your bodily symptoms. Perhaps you even start to recruit those subtle physiological changes as a way of keeping track, albeit at the subconscious level, which could be argued to be a source of hypervigillence feeding the awareness of symptoms that other people allow to pass them by (challenges with interoception, including the experience of certain body sensations being far more intense than for the average person, are also associated with autism). In my own experience, weather has a profound effect on my (chronic) health status: for instance, wind can cause my body to seize-up in profound muscle spasm and abject nerve pain, even (bizarrely) when I am protected from it indoors, as I have written about before. Cold has multiple adverse affects and is my least favourite thing, although hot weather brings its own challenges. Humidity throws my autonomic system into total disarray and sudden changes in air pressure can have long lasting effects, triggering episodes of painful joint laxity or prolonged fatigue, sudden IBS or profound brain fog. You could say, I have developed a vested interest in monitoring the weather over these last few years because of these worsening symptoms, although I can also trace a sensitivity to weather conditions right back to the health foibles of early childhood and adolescence so the hyper-awareness factor has always been there!

So, for me, its much more than a strong desire for predictability or sameness; when I fixate on the weather (even if this mostly occurs at the subconscious) its because I have my own personal safety and wellbeing in mind. This is no mere “hobby” I have chosen to have like studying clouds, and the same applies to EMF. I had nothing against modern tech until I began to notice the excitotoxic effects of being around it, in fact I was fairly addicted to using it (akin to most of the rest of the world) until I realised I had to ration my exposures for the sake of my health!

Whatever the driver for it, my attention pricked up when the linked paper echoed my own next thought: could it be that “The drive to study the weather through systemizing may involve a brain–behavior cycle in which the repetitive behavior trains, in a sense, the individual’s perceptual processing system to a point of expertise (Mottron et al. 2006).” Over time, “systemizing may work as a cognitive mechanism that strengthens perceptual salience, the degree to which something is noticeable to people (Stokols 1985; Taylor and Fiske 1979)”. In other words it may actually “aid the development of talent” (all quotes taken from “Initial Evidence for Increased Weather Salience in Autism Spectrum Conditions”). So what if that talent, the end result of these behaviour patterns, is the uncanny ability to pick up on the subtlest changes in environment or the broadest influencers of the weather? Is that what I have been unwittingly developing all these years?

In other words, is it possible that I trained my nervous system to pick up on these subtle/invisible environmental factors and then coached my synaesthesia-capable brain how to demonstrate to me when they are most active so that I can be alerted to changes in my environment that may very well herald a period of, let’s just say, increased health vulnerability? A few sparkles in my visual field, an increase in tinnitus tone and some skin-crawling sensations around my body and I am suddenly put on my guard, aware that I need to be extra careful or (when it comes to EMF exposure) withdraw from the field of danger altogether.

So what happened when I left the house that I stayed in overnight to “withdraw” to my quiet cottage in the middle of nowhere yesterday? Well, initially, the excitability seemed to increase and I felt almost as though I was in withdrawal from it, desperately wanting to go somewhere or do something impulsive to (I guess) prolong the feeling of hyper-stimulation I was by now growing accustomed to. However, when that impulse proved to be impractical (heavy rain set in for the afternoon) and we returned to our quiet place, I felt suddenly and utterly floored with tiredness, my brain went into extreme brain fog and I just needed to sleep…and sleep…until, groggy beyond belief, I emerged this morning to write these salient words on a topic that has so long fascinated me. Though I am writing away here, I have lost all people skills today and am in near total visual fog beyond the edges of the screen I am looking at, my spacial awareness so compromised I have hardly moved from my chair. This is turning into the biggest episode of near migraine (what I used to call “full-body migraine”, no headache required) that I have had for quite some time!

My weekend has also helped me to notice how, in my old life (where constant overstimulation was never a choice but a given of the place we were living in) the only way to survive it was often to join it; so I would have to keep diving into the most impulsive, more stimulating pursuits to somehow ride the constant influx of stimulating effects coming in at me from the outside…and, in essence, this made me appear far more “ADHD” than I am naturally inclined to be. My sleep was constantly poor, my nervous system living on the edge and the effect was to leave me depleted, on borrowed energy even when I was most awake or active, so that it took very little to tip me over the limit into burnout or meltdown.

That seems to bear out all those theories about how our overstimulating diets, TV and computer exposure etc are feeding into ever more diagnoses of ADHD in the younger population. Yes, the potential for it might be there in the DNA (I have no doubt it is in mine) but our modern lifestyle is making it more inevitable and often chronic. My quiet weeks leading a different life have demonstrated to me that it can be a choice to lower the likelihood of ADHD’s worse effects; an epigenetic button that can be activated, or not, depending on the style of living adopted.

The study above certainly found more interest in the weather amongst its autistic cohort than those who were neurotypical. In my own case, the “vested interest” part is crucial to my interest in weather, such as I have one (would I really be bothered at all if I was not so physical affected by it?) and likewise it found that “autistic participants reported greater impacts of weather on daily activities and mood”, pointing out that this warranted further research.

So, are effects such as the chaotic impact of the weather eased via the ability to systemise them? Does it help me when I try to make sense of it? I guess it’s fair to say that those few hypotheses I have ever formed about the correlation of, say, space weather and my least pleasant health symptoms helps me to not feel so alarmed when symptoms suddenly become very strong for “no reason” or seem to arrive “out of nowhere” and when there is no other logical explanation for them to be found. For instance, an increased tendency towards experiencing strong heart palpitations last night while the geomagnetic storm was still active helped me to reconcile this as my version of “normal” rather than something I needed to be overtly alarmed about. I have “learned the ropes” of certain symptoms induced by increased exposure to certain environmental factors and can take steps to reduce exposure or mitigate my response to those effects.

This all helps me to claw back some predictability and control (important factors to autistic-me) in circumstances that often feel “out of control” due to my extreme sensory sensitivities, especially given that they are largely unrelatable to anyone that I might otherwise call upon for support (GPs, for instance, in my experience have no understanding whatsoever of these effects or how impactful they can be and so there is no use in trying to discuss them in a medical context; in fact, it can even lose you their respect and attention because they assume you are delusional). Having to become my own helpmate and best source of medical advice in circumstances where environmental factors amp up symptoms such as IBS, brain fog, muscle laxity, joint and nerve pain or migraine, for instance, has been essential to my survival over the last few years of bewilderingly chronically challenges to health. Its helped me to hold onto some sense of normalcy and predictability rather than falling into an abject fear of the complete randomness of such flare-ups…and, in fact, I have found so many correlations between environmental factors and symptoms that I am able to see how its “not always me” that is falling into chaos but, more likely, the outside factor to which my high-sensitivity is responding, which helps me to stay calm and pragmatic. I may not be able to predict the weather before it happens but I can at least start to predict its effects…at least on me…and this gives me some agency.

As my own systemising process has evolved, I have also had to learn to be wary of (my own strong tendency towards) holding overly rigid beliefs about what then occurs. For instance, a space weather event “may” increase the likelihood of migraine but does not guarantee that is the case. If I am aware of the increased likelihood, I can take steps to mitigate this, such as avoiding high EMF exposure at the same time; something which was impossible to do this particular weekend as were staying away from home but at least, when symptoms occurred, I was not thrown into catastophising the reasons why. A further evolution of this approach would be to consider, could I possibly entrain myself to become less interested in weather or EMF exposures, to think about or check up on correlations with my health far less than I have been doing over the past decade, in order to try and encourage my extra-awareness of these things to die down into the background of my experience rather than allowing them to be front and centre where they (to some extent) dictate the quality of experience of my life? This is something I have been doing lately with EMF, as in, allowing myself to become more exposed than I used to be whilst softening my assumptions around what might occur in an endeavour to make life more practical, going forwards, since avoidance is becoming far less of an option than it used to be. The positive result has been that I am now able to tolerate using tech much more than I once did including being exposed to wifi most days now (though, ideally, not at night) without some of the severely adverse physical responses that I used to get. I like to think of it as aclimatising to what is; a kind of radical acceptance so that I can get on with my life.

High sensitivity “just is” for those of us who have it: I can’t alter this factor of my neurodivergence any more than I can alter the colour of my eyes. Learning to live with it is a whole other factor and remains a work in progress. So could it be that synaesthesia (in addition to enhancing my creativity, my music appreciation, my memory, my ability to sense what other people are going through…which can be both a gift and a curse) is helping me to navigate a chaotic world; that, rather than fear its colourful or noisy effects, I can be grateful to it for making apparent the various influencers in my environment which, like it or lump it, are often so impactful upon my physical health? Is it a gift to have synaesthesia and even, in its way, a gift to be so hyperaware of the environment that I am informed and forewarned in ways that other people seem to lack? These are just more of the ways that I am steadily coming to terms with my neurodiversity, becoming ever more inclined to notice the benefits and the skills, you could say the “salience” and the gifts, rather than the pitfalls, the flaws and the deficits.

Read much more on this topic in my next post Synesthesia and sensory meltdown: is there a link?