Sensory Differences

At its simplest, autism is a difference in brain structure. This difference in the brain can cause all sorts of differences in how the autistic person experiences and processes any and all sensory stimuli. I briefly touched on sensory processing when I wrote-up my support sessions that I had a few months ago, but I wanted to go through some of the atypical ways my senses work in more detail.

There are 5 classic senses that everyone knows about; these being vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. During my support sessions when they asked us what we think the 6th sense is I joked about seeing dead people, but in all seriousness there are vestibular, proprioception and interoception, making 8 senses in all.
Vestibular is the sense of balance and spatial orientation, co-ordinating the two for movement.
Proprioception is the sense of positioning of the body and its parts in 3 dimensional space and involves the effort that's used in movement.
Interoception is the sense of what's going on inside the body and helps to understand whether you're hungry, in pain, tired etc.

With any of the senses, the person can be either over-sensitive (hypersensitive), under-sensitive (hyposensitive), or both depending on the person and the situation. Hypersensitivity can lead to things like meltdown through the stimulus being too much and triggering the person's fight/flight response. It can also cause burnout through the person having to process so much at once, especially if it's over a prolonged period of time. Hyposensitivity is often found in sensory seekers where they need to find or create additional sensory input to get the amount they need. I personally haven't had any experience of being both hyper and hyposensitive interchangeably, but it can change depending on the situation, the person and the sensory input.

The first of my sensory differences that springs to mind is my hyposensitivity to pain. This explains why I enjoy getting tattooed as it's a sensory seeking activity for me as much as it is about the tattoos themselves. It also explains why when I was hospitalised a few weeks ago with appendicitis I a) struggled to rate the pain out of 10, and b) decided it was around 6 or 7 whereas most people with appendicitis would rate it higher. It felt horrible as it was, so I dread to think what it would have been like if I had a neurotypical pain tolerance! My experience of getting admitted to hospital didn't help as I was on my knees in the A&E waiting area in agony and vomiting for quite a while before I was given a bed or any pain relief, but I digress. My last thing to mention in regard to pain processing also relates to my preference for chewing. Before I got my chewer I found myself biting my fingers to shreds and I often found it enjoyable to bite my fingers hard enough for it to hurt. I do miss the pain of it, but now that I've got my chewer it's much better for my fingers and I get enough out of it when I need to.

I've always been aware that my sense of smell isn't brilliant compared to most people. I do detect smells in the air but not always, and if I do smell anything it's often only after somebody else has mentioned it that I notice it. I also really struggle to identify what a smell is. Being a parent of 2 young kids has taught me to identify the smell of a nappy that needs changing (and sometimes even which child specifically needs changing!), but even then I don't always pick up on it. It's a similar thing with taste in that I often can't identify a certain taste without knowing what it is that I'm eating. But they do say that smell and taste are pretty much the same sense except one is in the tongue and one is in the nose.

The last one I'm going to mention isn't so much a hyper/hyposensitivity thing, rather it's more to do with the processing of it. This is my auditory processing difficulty. The example that I used in my autism assessment is that if me and my wife are both in the bathroom and one of us is in the shower while she's trying to talk to me, because of the noise of the shower I struggle to hear what she's saying even though I can hear her voice talking to me. My brain struggles to decipher both at the same time, so because the shower is the simpler one to figure out (it's a shower - it makes a shower noise) I can't figure out the words that Sarah is using despite the fact that I can hear her voice loud and clear. Looking back to when I was younger and used to go on nights out every weekend I now realise that my auditory processing issues were quite obvious back then as well. Everyone seemed to be able to hear each other absolutely fine over the music in whichever pub/club we were in but I struggled to make out what anyone was saying to me. This lead to people thinking that I needed to get my hearing checked when in fact my hearing itself has always been fine, it's just processing multiple sounds at the same time that I struggle with.

These are just the sensory differences that I'm aware of. I've been diagnosed for almost a year now but following diagnosis the journey of self-discovery and realisation can last a lifetime. There's also the fact that things can sometime change as we grow older, so I'm sure there are plenty of other differences that I'll notice and come to understand in myself as time goes on. Speaking of being diagnosed for a year, I'll be doing a special Q&A post on the week of my 1 year diagnosiversary (that's officially a word as of now), which will be in 5 weeks' time on 6th December. Please ask any and all questions that you've got for me on Twitter using the hashtag #AutQA and I'll answer them in that post next month. It doesn't even necessarily have to be about autism - depending how it goes I might answer some non-autism questions as well.

That's it from me this week. As always, please click the "Subscribe" button at the top of the page to follow the blog, and also please follow me on Twitter @DepictDave. It helps you keep up to date with the blog, and it helps me get the word out there for autism acceptance.