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Thinking In Pictures
I’m going to mostly skip this interesting chapter, but here’s just a taste.
P62
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Many autistic children crave pressure stimulation even though they cannot tolerate being touched. It is much easier for a person with autism to tolerate touch if he or she initiates it... Parents used to report that their autistic children loved to crawl under mattresses and wrap up in blankets or wedge themselves in tight places, long before anyone made sense of this strange behavior.
I was one of these pressure seekers. When I was six, I would wrap myself up in blankets and get under sofa cushions, because the pressure was relaxing. [I think this is true for most people? ] I used to daydream for hours in elementary school about constructing a device that would apply pressure to my body. I visualized a box with an inflatable liner that I could lie in. It would be like being totally encased in inflatable splints.
P63 After visiting my aunt’s ranch in Arizona, I got the idea of building such a device, patterned after the cattle squeeze chute I first saw there. When I watched cattle being put in the squeeze chute for their vaccinations, I noticed that some of them relaxed when they were pressed between the side panels. I guess I had made my first connection between those cows and myself, because a few days later, after I had a big panic attack, I just got inside the squeeze chute... Since puberty I had experienced constant fear and anxiety coupled with severe panic attacks... My life was based on avoiding situations that might trigger an attack.
I asked Aunt Ann to press the squeeze sides against me and to close the head restraint bars around my neck... At first there were a few moments of sheer panic as I stiffened up and tried to pull away from the pressure, but I couldn’t get away... Five seconds later I felt a wave of relaxation, and about thirty minutes later I asked Aunt Ann to release me. For about an hour afterwards I felt very calm and serene. My constant anxiety had diminished. This was the first time I ever felt really comfortable in my own skin...
I copied the design and built the first human squeeze machine out of plywood panels when I returned to school. Entering the machine on hands and knees, I applied pressure to both sides of my body...
[The authorities at her school are not on-board with this idea. Today there are commercially available updates on her squeeze machine available to the autistic community.]
This chapter is something of a mixed bag. She also talks about body boundary problems and sensitive skin and then moves on to auditory problems which can be severe and vary amazingly. I’m going to skip most of this.
Auditory Problems
P67 ...I still have problems with losing my train of thought when distracting noises occur. If a pager goes off while I am giving a lecture, it fully captures my attention and I completely forget what I was talking about... Several research studies have shown that rapid shifting of attention between two different stimuli is very difficult for people with autism... ... there is a fundamental impairment in the brain’s ability to process incoming information rapidly.
P68 When two people are talking at once, it is difficult for me to screen out one voice and listen to the other...
...People with autism usually seem to have normal hearing when tested with the standard test, which measures the ability to hear faint pure tones. My hearing tested normal on that test. The problem arises in processing complex sounds such as spoken words.
Especially with background or other distracting sounds, I may be becoming autistic by this standard.
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P69 [The researcher testing Grandin’s hearing,] ...explained to me that the kinds of problems I have in processing speech indicate defects in my brain stem and possibly the corpus callosum, the bundle of neurons that allows the two halves of the brain to communicate. The brain stem is one of the relay stations that send input from the ears to the thinking parts of the brain.
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P70 My auditory problems are very mild compared with those of individuals who are more severely afflicted with autism. Some people have lost all or almost all ability to understand speech. Others have such acute hearing that everyday noises are completely intolerable. One person said that rain sounded like gunfire; others claim they hear blood whooshing through their veins or every sound in an entire school building...
10/29/16: I'm reviewing this book and have to add something here. This summer I was overseeing the seismic retrofit work at my building. I especially had to be attuned to traffic in our alley early in the morning when the garbage collectors, porta-potty servicer, and our contractors could interfere with each other. Our alley is about half a block long opening at only one end to a larger street. Over time I became proficient at detecting and identifying sounds out on the street that related to our building... while still in bed.
Our work is complete now and I've gone back to only noticing sounds directly outside our building. This shows, I think, how we have sensory capabilities beyond what we usually need or are aware of. Under the right circumstances, our brains can fine tune our awareness as needed, but this, presumably, is precisely the ability autistics lack.
P73 Some people have very severe visual processing problems, and sight may be their most unreliable sense...
...Some of the problems autistics have with making eye contact may be nothing more than an intolerance for the movement of the other person’s eyes. One autistic person reported that looking at other people’s eyes was difficult because the eyes did not stay still. Face recognition also presents certain problems for many people with autism.
P74 ...Barbara Jones... told me that to remember a face, she has to see the person fifteen times. Barbara works in a laboratory identifying cancer cells under a microscope. Her ability to recognize patterns has made her one of the best technicians in the lab. Her visual abilities enable her to spot abnormal cells instantly, because they just jump out at her. But there is some evidence that facial recognition involves different neural systems from those used for imagery of objects such as buildings.
Again, this is a little too close to home.
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Distorted visual images may possibly explain why some children with autism favor peripheral vision. They may receive more reliable information when they look out of the corners of their eyes. One autistic person reported that he saw better from the side and that he didn’t see things if he looked straight at them.
Smell and Taste
Many autistic children like to smell things, and smell may provide more reliable information about their surroundings than either vision or hearing... only 30 percent [in one study] reported taste or smell oversensitivities.
...Neil Walker reported that one person refused to walk on a lawn because he could not bear the smell of grass. Several autistic people have told me that they remember people by smell. And one reported that he liked safe smells such as the smell of pots and pans, [?] which he associated with his home.
Sensory Mixing
P76 ...a twenty-seven-year-old male graduate student with autism... described difficulty hearing and seeing at the same time as his sensory channels got mixed up. Sound came through as color, while touching his face produced a soundlike sensation. Donna Williams describes herself as mono channel; in other words she cannot see and hear at the same time. When she is listening to somebody speak, visual input loses its meaning. She is unable to perceive a cat jumping on her lap while she is listening to a friend talk...
...Therese Joliffe succinctly summarizes the chaos caused by autistic sensory problems:
Reality to an autistic person is a confusing interacting mass of events, people, places, sounds and sights. There seem to be no clear boundaries, order or meaning to anything. A large part of my life is spent just trying to work out the pattern behind everything. Set routines, times, particular routes and rituals all help to get order into an unbearably chaotic life.
...
Donna Williams found the world incomprehensible, and she had to fight constantly to get meaning from her senses. When she gave up trying to get meaning, she would let her attention wander into fractured patterns, which were entertaining, hypnotic, and secure. In Somebody Somewhere she writes, “This was the beautiful side of autism. This was the sanctuary of the prison.” People with severe sensory processing problems can also go into total shutdown when they become overstimulated.
This is what it’s like to live constantly with Annie Dillard’s “tree with the lights in it.”
P77 Many therapists and doctors confuse autistic perceptual problems with the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenics, but true schizophrenics delusions and hallucinations follow a different pattern. Autistic fantasies [I’ll come back to this] can be confused with hallucinations, but the autistic person knows they are fantasies, whereas the schizophrenic believes they are reality...
...
Donna Williams has been greatly helped by Irlen tinted glasses, which filter out irritating color frequencies and enable her defective visual system to handle sharp contrast. The glasses stopped fracturing visual perception. She is now able to see an entire garden instead of bits and pieces of flowers. Tom McKean has less severe visual processing problems, but he finds that wearing rust-colored glasses with a purplish tint has stopped areas of high contrast from vibrating. Another woman with mild visual problems has also been greatly helped by rose-colored glasses... [ha]
Annie Dillard and Muriel Barbery (and I) would have reservations about Grandin’s use of the word “fantasies” to describe the way these autistic people perceive reality. I haven’t repeated all the filters (like the rose-colored glasses) Grandin describes as being helpful for the autistic to experience reality in a more “normal” way. Which is, of course, simply the way our brains normally filter this same input. It would be asking too much to have an autistic person report a slimy green cat, but we’re good enough Phenomenologists now to make that jump.
This is not to say that any particular autistic person possesses the unique ability to perceive the Thing In Itself. But, collectively, they point to the arbitrariness of our own perceptions. As with so many things, there seems to be both a nature and nurture component to how we perceive reality. We are taught by our families (for the most part) how to interpret the raw data reported by our senses, but the physical quality of those senses and of the neurological components they feed into also determine what reality is for us. All you need to drive this point home is yet another thought experiment.
Imagine an isolated community where everyone was autistic to the same degree. Auditory conventions, color conventions, even behavioral conventions would be adapted to suit the sensitivities of this population. Were a “normal” person to venture into that community he would, unless he studied very carefully the habits of the natives, offend everyone by what we would deem “normal” behavior. He might not even be recognizable as human in their terms.
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