Researchers go fishing to find cause of sound sensitivity in autism

“So we looked at calcium transients in zebrafish brains and that showed us how their brains responded to sound, and then we could map where those responses to sound were in the brain.”

Loud noises are a common problem for some people on the autism spectrum, often causing issues ranging from anxiety to full sensory overload.

The researchers used zebrafish with the same gene altered as people with sound-sensitive autism and Fragile X to study the brain’s reactions to sound.

The fish were shown clips of their natural predators to gauge how they dealt with visual input, and they were also exposed to bursts of white noise to see their response to sound.

The reaction to the visual input was the same across all the fish studied, but the ones…