Abstract
Autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia are thought to be neurodevelopmental diseases. Both of those have a prevalence of about 1%, which impair sociality and communication. Interestingly, both disorders commonly exhibit the impaired auditory capabilities such as hypersensitivity / insensitivity to sound and delay of language development for autism spectrum disorders and auditory hallucination and language illusion for schizophrenia. Human chromosomes 22q11 and 16p11 abnormalities frequently cause these mental diseases, but at the same time, some of these patients as well as their model animals have ear problem and sensory hearing loss. Does these hearing deficits or auditory cognitive dysfunction represent the cause or the actual condition of these diseases? From the current viewpoint of the top-down information processing from the frontal lobe cortex, I would like to consider biological implication of the auditory physiology and otolaryngological pathology of autistic spectrum disorder and schizophrenia.
