Embryonic Brain’s Spontaneous Activity Promote Synesthesia?

Antón-Bolaños et al. (2019) report a newly identified neural pathway mechanism, where the patterned spontaneous activity regulates the excitability of a neural network essential for the formation and maintenance of functional sensory maps in the brain. Findings from the study suggest that the patterned spontaneous activity prevalent during the embryonic development of the brain; at the early stages of innervation to the cortex, contributes to the formation of these sensory maps. Synesthesia is a neural phenomenon caused by the unusual links between sensory information, where synesthetic subjects demonstrate atypical functional and neural connectivity caused by the differences in cortical wiring during brain development. So, based on the findings from Antón-Bolaños et al. (2019), one can anticipate the role of spontaneous activity in promoting synesthetic condition. Thus, it will be interesting to study, if the intrinsic spontaneous activity influences the differential cortical wiring and the formation of sensory maps in synesthesia.