subjected to noises that trigger misophonic responses, they feel as if they are being overloaded by auditory stimuli and seek to escape from or block out the triggering noise. Compared to healthy controls, people with misophonia display a lower N100 peak in response to mismatch negative (MMN), but this is not a reliable biomarker for the condition and sensory overload. A more reliable indicator that hints at proneness to sensory overload is heightened activation of the anterior insular cortex which is evoked by trigger noises and can be measured by fMRI; the anterior insular cortex may be involved with the pathway that gives rise to the sensation of sensory overload in people with misophonia. Synesthesia There is evidence that the visual cortex of people with grapheme-color synesthesia is more excitable than that of typical people; additionally, people with grapheme-color synesthesia respond more strongly to visual stimuli compared to people without the condition. People with grapheme-color synesthesia report feeling visual stress and discomfort in response to gratings of mid and high spatial frequencies, correlating to a sensory overload response evoked by intense visual stimuli. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) People with general anxiety disorder are highly sensitive to external anxiety triggering stimuli and deal with exposure to these triggers through neurotic thoughts. People with GAD are biased to perceive sensory stimuli as negative or threatening and this bias feeds into negative thought processes which further exacerbate feelings of worry, stress, and anxiety. People with GAD are hypersensitive and hypervigilant to ambiguous, neutral, and emotional stimuli and often compartmentalize such stimuli as negative. People with GAD are prone to sensory overload when in novel settings or interacting with new people since ambiguous and neutral stimuli in these instances are usually processed as threatening or negative; adolescents and children with GAD are especially avoidant of and distressed by novel stimuli which is theorized to be elicited by either a hyperactive sympathetic nervous system or an under-active parasympathetic nervous system. Autistic spectrum disorders People with autistic spectrum disorders including autism and Asperger syndrome experience auditory hypersensitivity which can lead to sensory overload. Although people with autism do not have abnormalities in P50 sensory gating, they have anomalies in sensory gating related to the N100 test which indicates an irregularity in attention-related direction and top-down mental pathways. It is speculated that disturbances and issues with directing attention towards relevant or salient stimuli, evinced by deviations from