What are Your Sensory Issues?

Post Reply New Topic

I've flunked tests to gauge sense of smell, but that doesn't bother me.

Very ticklish, to the point, like others, where clothing and other things touching can be agonizing. I also have trouble understanding what's being said over a public address system, and some radios and televisions. Very annoying to try to make out the words, but at the same time, my hearing is very sharp.

Damaged rectal and anal nerves.

It never occurred to me that I had sensory issues until others pointed them out to me. I can be a bit oblivious.

Auditory:
I couldn't get to sleep last night due to the fact that it was raining. People always say the sound of rain soothes them and makes it easier for them to sleep. Not me! I hear every drop.

If there are a lot of different noises, it's all a roar and I can't hear any of it. Don't even try to talk to me in a restaurant or pub. My boyfriend always makes references to songs that are playing on the jukebox, but even if I try really hard to hear it, even if it's my favorite song in the world, I cannot make out what it is.

I get really irritated by people talking in the background, phones ringing, horns honking, TV or music playing in the background, and on and on. If I'm trying to concentrate on something and there's too much environmental noise, I will start shouting. I absolutely cannot listen to music and study or work at the same time. On the other hand, once I've managed to "zone out", I am so absolutely concentrated on what I'm doing that I don't notice anything else. I used to work in an office facing away from the door, and I was always startled by people coming up behind me because I didn't notice they were there.

Oh, and at dinner today, for some reason my teeth scraped together oddly a couple of times while I was chewing and made the most horrible noise. It almost made me cry.

Visual:
I've never been able to stand bright light. I was always being chastised for reading "in the dark" when I was a kid, but I can't read when the lights are too bright. I have to wear sunglasses any time I'm outside during the day. (I even have to wear them inside when I'm contracting on site for this one company because the entire wall is glass.) And I'm always closing shades/curtains after other people open them to let the sun shine in.

I get panicky if I have to drive at night when it's raining, because I can't tell where the road is. The world is just one big blob of lights and glare. That's one of the most frightening things in the world, to me. I end up driving maybe 20 MPH and I'm never sure exactly how I manage to actually make it home. (I used to think I needed glasses, but when I got tested, my vision was perfect.)

Caps lock gives me a headache. It really hurts to read it. Is that sensory? I'm not sure, because I have the same issue with text speak. I can't read it. It's not that I can't make out what it says. It just hurts my head when I try.

Touch:
I'm not overly sensitive to touch, but I can't bear to wear tight or uncomfortable clothes. I cannot concentrate on work if I have to dress up for it. All I can think about is how uncomfortable I am. I can't stand my hair in my face, so it's always pulled back (and yet I won't cut it off, because that would require regular visits to the salon). I don't like it when random people have the need to touch me when they're talking to me, or hug me or kiss me, but I like it when it's someone I'm close to (which are admittedly very few). I also get really aggravated when people bump into me.

Smell:
Cleaning products, perfumes, smelly soaps, and smoke give me headaches. But aside from that, I don't think my sense of smell is that great. At least I don't notice it much.

Taste:
If anything, I think I'm hyposensitive to taste. Spicy foods are my favorite (especially Indian), and many foods that other people love are just bland to me.

TASTE!! !
I cannot choke down anything my taste buds don't like. As a result, my diet is severely limited.

Hearing, I pick up very high frequencies like the hum of an old TV.
Being wet is another major problem, which completely interferes with my personal hygiene.

[size=12]

Same. My father used to tell me that I would go blind because I didn't mind reading when it was dark. I came to a point where now, I don't mind light as much.


When I first started driving, my father didn't allow me or my twin brother to drive at night because every time I drove, it would start raining, and I just couldn't see! Like you say, everything was just blobs, and I couldn't differentiate between the horizon line, the division of the left and right lane, or car lights and street lights. I still hate driving when it rains...


My goodness, there is just something about Caps that bothers me so much. It's as if someone is yelling at my eyes. I also hate large fonts, unless they're so obnoxiously large that they've become shapes instead of words. Caps and large fonts are so obnoxious to me.



Oh yes, yes! I have a thing about some food textures, however, taste is a different thing! I hate mushrooms, but I loooove the way they taste, for example. I also love spicy foods. Whenever I cook, I want to put as many ingredients as possible. And I love weird mixes, like contrasts. For example, my new obsession? Pumpkin Spice cream cheese with Salt and Vinegar Kettle chips. My god, why is that sooo delicious?! Also, fries dipped in milkshakes? What? Yum! And when I was young, I used to like [GagGagGag] Jello and BBQ sauce all mixed up together.

The only thing that really has been an issue that impacts my life daily is my reaction to certain sounds. I think I'm good at avoiding everything else.

Sounds: mouths, basically. Chewing, liquids moving about in the mouth, teeth crunching hard candy, lips smacking, people biting their nails(or nails being clipped.) the sound of someone spitting, slurping, sniffing, coughing, sneezing, I can't possibly list everything. I've been in the habit of carrying earplugs since I was eight years old.

Smells: I am careful not to be exposed to milk as the smell causes me to vomit instantly, the smell of chicken or beef or pork, most food that is an animal product makes me nauseated at best. And most animals smell awful, most people included. Vanilla is really terrible. Anything with a sweet smell, perfumes, soaps, lotions, most "air freshener" products smell terrible to me.

Touch: Wool, chalk, dirt, gravel, concrete, terrycloth, hair, the list is endless I suppose... but chalk is really the only thing that I will panic and run from just to avoid the possibility of touching it. I can't stand it when people touch my neck.

Tastes: I've never been able to try meat/dairy/eggs etc. to my recollection but I'm quite certain I couldn't even if I wanted to. I cannot stand the sweet taste of my ADHD meds so I have to put it into food and swallow it or I'll gag and be unable to. I have to do the same with most tablets. Most of the foods I can't eat are related to smell or texture though.

I'm confused with the sensory issues. I'm always hearing NTs complaining about bright lights, being touched too much, bad smells, and not liking food. The hearing part I understand - only very few NTs complain about loud noise, but all these other sensory issues seem common in any people.
Yesterday my NT auntie was driving in the dark and I was in the car with her, and she kept getting dazzled by oncoming cars who had their fog lights on. Also, when I was at college, I was in a class full of NTs, and there was a flashing light on the ceiling what needed changing, and everyone in there were complaining of headaches and/or feeling distracted by the flashing light, and I sat there and said, ''it's not that bad!'' But I do have ordinary eyesight.

And at work the other week, a customer walked in and he stunk of sweat. After he left, the manager got upset with the smell what lingered, and sprayed air freshening stuff all round the small shop.

It's so annoying when people say that NTs don't get bothered by anything. What do you think they are? Deaf? Blind? Blocked up in the sinuses all the time? Like every food put on their plate? Numb and can't feel anything touch them? If anything they must be in their own world, if they can't sense anything (according to what I read about AS everywhere).
At least I know NTs and what they're really like. I don't think sensory issues have much to do with AS - mostly sensory with loud noises is typically known in AS, not other sensorys as much, unless you're obsessively in hatred of other sensorys, like I am with loud noise. If I know a sudden loud noise is going to start any minute, I panic.

Everyone can experience sensory overstimulation, I imagine, but not everyone has the same thresholds. I am sure many NTs complain about bright lights but how many find themselves wearing sunglasses everywhere? Or overwhelmed and choking on the smell of a small amount of cologne? Or finds soft touches painful?



A flashing light is out of the ordinary for everyone. Anyone will be dazzled by bright headlights, especially while driving in the dark. Many people on the autistic spectrum find normally functioning fluorescent lights to be distracting and painful to cope with, which is not typical.



Some autistic people can't stand the smell of scented soap and shampoo. Or the smell of air freshening stuff.



Who's saying NTs don't get bothered by anything? It's a matter of degree and variety. NTs who don't have SPD can be bothered by sensory input, but it won't be the same sensory input.

Why do you think that only noise is a problem with AS? Sensory processing disorder is probably present in the majority of people on the spectrum, and that covers all senses.

People that are in my classes think it is weird that I don't have issues with food textures because they think that is the most common problem with people on the spectrum. Whatever we aren't all the same!

I'm very sensitive to light. Fluorescent lights, sunlight and other strong lights literally feel like I'm being stabbed in the eyes. Normal daylight and normal light bulbs are also too bright for me and feel very unpleasant.

Smells that make me nauseous are those of tobacco, coffee, fried hot dogs, candles, fireworks, the smoke after a match or a candle has been put out and skin cremes that don't contain any perfume (especially one brand that my father uses). Those smells make me nauseous even if there is only slight smell of them (like if a neighbour is smoking in their home or if someone is making coffee in another room). I'm sensitive to some other smells, but those are the worst.

I'm sensitive to the electric buzz of electric applicances, like fluorescent lights or normal light bulbs, TVs, DVD players, computers, copy machines etc. I'm very sensitive to the sounds of laundry machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners and radios (the sound is never clean, I can always hear the sound of a bad radio signal in the background).

I'm sensitive to the texture of most crunchy foods. I can eat them, but I always feel uncomfortable while I'm at it and I try to avoid it or to enhance the texture somehow. For example, apples are too crunchy for me to just bite into them, but if I grate them the texture is ok. Toasted bread is too crunchy too, but if I put butter or something like that on it and then leave it for a couple of minutes, it stops being so crunchy. So my sensory issues with textures don't cause any huge problems with eating for me.

I'm sensitive to certain touch. There are places and ways in which I don't like to be touched.

Those are most of my negative sensory issues. I do have some pleasant sensory experiences too though. There are certain sounds, smells, textures, touch etc. that I really enjoy and seek to experience whenever possible.

I can't tolerate hot foods or liquids. I have to wait for stuff to cool down in order to eat it. Hot coffee is out of the question, but ice coffee is the cat's ass.

Very hot or very cold things touching my hands--very hot water, icy cold foods, etc. It makes my nerves in my hands and forearms seer with pain.

Hyperacusis--I love that there's a term for it. Deep male voices, high pitched whines, blasting loud sounds like car stereos or firetruck, just make me feel like I'm being beaten down or drained.

The smell of regular coffee--smells like some kind of pungent animal urine to me. Espresso smells differently to me. I don't mind espresso, but if I drink coffee it needs milk and flavoring to cover up that uriney smell.

Discussions of sensory issues always seem strange to me. It's not that I don't have hypersensitive senses, not that I don't have specific stimuli that set me off, not even that I don't have very severe misophonia (I'm almost always a 9 or a 10 on the misophonia scale, sometimes an 8 if I'm lucky -- see http://www.misophonia-uk.org/the-misoph ... scale.html ).

But... those feel like side-issues compared with the main things that affect my sensory perception.

As far as sensory input goes as a whole, I feel like I'm swimming (or drowning) in huge swirls of it that make no sense to me.

Vision is like a whole bunch of fragmented pieces dancing around. Sound is about equivalent. Touch a little less so in some ways. (This is enough that I've had doctors, without my knowing until later, fill out certain forms a certain way. They'll have like boxes you check for normal vision, low vision, and blind, and they will check "low vision" and "hard of hearing" on those forms even though technically my vision is correctable to almost normal and my hearing is better than normal. Because it's not just about the acuity of a sense, it's also about how you use it, and I have real trouble using those to get meaning out of.)

My best sense is sort of... whatever it is when you are moving through space, as well as smell, and some elements of touch.

There are times, very quiet times, when things seem to almost fit together. But... it's weird. It's painful. It is like teetering on the edge of falling apart altogether. If it's vision, I will see things in great detail, each detail being its own sort of pain, and they just almost almost fit together normally. But then they sort of quiver and fall apart. I often take off my glasses when things are like that to try to make everything more blurry and easier to manage. That can also happen with every sense, I just know more words for vision so I keep describing it.

Any individual sense may cut out entirely, becoming unavailable to me at all. And in fact all or most of them cut out sometimes, as does understanding, so I'm just experiencing the world, but not experiencing any sensory input or any thought. But there is still experience without all those things, which is one reason that I don't like when people judge the life of people who have way more input and thought than that going on, as "not thinking well enough to be worth living" or something like that.

Trying to understand anything through a sense is a whole other thing. Generally I'll see shapes and colors and visual textures but I won't see "bicycle" or "table" and the like. Identifying things like that takes cognitive effort, because it requires using categories and ideas and abstraction, and my mind doesn't naturally do categories and ideas and abstraction without a fight. (Yes, "bicycle" is an abstraction compared to the feel and sound and shininess of any individual bicycle.)

Oddly enough (or perhaps not so oddly) despite the fact that I have all these apparent problems with sensory information, sensory information remains the entirety of my natural thought (the kind of thinking I do without putting effort into it). I don't naturally use ideas, abstractions, categories, etc. I naturally just deal with the direct sensations of anything, and then the (concrete) patterns those sensations form. This happens without my intending it, sometimes without my even being aware of it, and it has gone on so long that it has evolved into a complex system of navigating the world. (Many autistic people say they were like this up to the age of about four or something, and assume that being like this inevitably means being utterly confused. It doesn't, it's just that when you're four, life is confusing whether things are like this or not, because you haven't come up with a good way to understand it yet.) I even do things with this way of thinking that seem like they wouldn't be possible without the other way of thinking. (I can do the more "normal" way of thinking too, but it's difficult, painful, and short, even when I manage to do it extremely well -- it just falls apart.)

And yeah... all that ends up having a lot more impact on my life than specific sensations that I don't like, or even than hyper- or hypo-sensitive senses.

Taste:
* I cannot stand shrimp! I refuse to eat it because I can feel the segments of the body in my mouth, and that grosses me out.
* Greasy food. I will not eat a hamburger or pizza that is swimming in grease.
* Spicy foods. I am extremely sensitive to pepper of any sort. Black pepper is hot to me, and I won't eat it.
* I am hypersensitive to flavors and taste things that many of my friends rarely notice in foods.
* I refuse to eat carrots, peas, & sweet potatoes because they are super sweet to me and vegetables should not be sweet.

Touch:
* I touch all fabrics/linens. If it is scratchy, I will not buy it, and I will not touch it again. If it is soft and smooth, I will touch it repeatedly and am very likely to buy it.
* I love fuzzy blankets
* When people touch me, and I am not expecting it, it's as if someone has physically shocked me.
* I have days when I can't stand my clothes because they touch me

Smell:
* I smell things burning long before people see the smoke. When I worked in a plant I would often tell people something was burning about an 30 min to an hour before anyone else could smell or see it.

Sound:
* Repetitive sounds drive me crazy.
* When I can only hear part of something, it bothers me enough to make me angry (bass, but not the rest of the music)
* When it's quiet, I can hear cats walking on carpet, watches ticking in the next room, etc.
* Certain voices make me cringe. I must plug my ears a bit in order to continue listening.

That idea confuses me too. Virtually all autistic people I have ever met have sensory differences, sometimes enormous ones. And these have even been verified in studies. For instance, overall, autistic people (even autistic people who need to wear glasses) perceive more visual detail overall than nonautistic people do.

As for noise, the ironic thing is that noise complaints are incredibly common among nonautistic people. Possibly more common than sensory complaints in other senses. That's why we have the entire idea of "noise pollution", and most people don't like living near freeways and airports and other noisy places. I certainly hear more people complaining about noise levels than light levels.

I'm not surprised though that some people don't believe it could be possible that it's a part of autism. (Even though perceptual differences may be more at the core of autism than any other thing is, although manifesting in many different ways.) It's one of those things where... there's what doctors see in autistic people, and then there's what autistic people see in autistic people. Ever since autistic people have been describing our experiences, we have overwhelmingly described sensory differences as one of the main ways we experience the world differently than nonautistic people. Not just aversions to specific stimuli, but general oversensitivity, undersensitivity, scrambled senses, perceiving things nonautistic people don't perceive, sensory 'noise', synaesthesia, difficulty interpreting information through one or more senses, trouble differentiating between "foreground" and "background" in any given sense, and just every manner of perceptual difference that we can notice about ourselves. The thing is, though, that a lot of people don't care what we say about ourselves. They only care what doctors and other professionals notice about us. Even though many of the issues that professionals notice about us can come about because of sensory differences. If you read books by autistic people you will rarely come across anyone who doesn't mention sensory differences even if they're from an era when that wasn't widely known as an issue for autistic people, even if they themselves hadn't known anything about autism when they wrote the book in some cases. When we talk among ourselves, you similarly come up with long lists of sensory stuff. If you ignore this part of autism you're ignoring a huge part of what motivates most autistic people's actions.

Nonautistic people aren't (generally) totally oblivious to the world around them. But there's a possibility that they are more oblivious to it than many autistic people, because they may have better filtering of sensory information than we do. If that's true, it would probably be because... when they look around a room, they don't see the room. They see the room as filtered through a bunch of cognitive stuff. Like the thinking part of their brain tells the sensing part of their brain what to notice and what input to disregard. Autistic people may well have less of that going on (or in some theories, we have it going on much the same as anyone else, but are able to drop the filters sometimes, whereas nonautistic people are never able to drop the filters). In that sense they'd be more 'in their own little world' than we are -- for real, not just as a joke. It may or may not be true but it's been seriously considered as a possibility (and even as possibly part of the central features of autism).

A friend of mine wrote a really cool chart that sums up a lot of what's wrong with how people look at autism. I seriously suggest anyone interested read her entire article which is here:

http://www.existenceiswonderful.com/200 ... utism.html

Note that at least two of the people she quotes are actual autism researchers, and both of them mention sensory or perceptual differences from the norm. (Perceptual is just saying that it is the brain rather than the sense organs that are different, sensory is a less formal term but referring to some of the same stuff.) I happen to know because I've read some of the same research that they have, that perceptual differences from the norm have been shown on many different levels in many different senses in autistic people by now. It's pretty much an accepted fact, no longer controversial, that autistic people have differences from the norm in how we perceive the world. (What's debated is what those differences mean.)

And anyway the really cool chart she came up with looks like this:



She basically breaks autistic traits up into three parts with different colors. The blue part are actual differences in the structure of our brains, which are not outwardly visible at all. The yellow part is the experiences of being autistic, which are also not outwardly visible. The orange part is the behavior in autistic people that can be observed from the outside, which is the only one of these three things that is outwardly visible.

I'm going to quote her directly now about the orange column, the bolded emphasis will be mine:



Basically, most people identify autism only with whatever the current view of the meaning of outwardly observable traits is. And yet this is the least likely view to be accurate, because it's subject to all kinds of distortions.

The yellow column is the one that involves cognitive and perceptual traits (which includes what most people call "sensory issues"). You can test for these traits, but you can't generally (easily) see them just by looking at people unless you know what to look for. And the problem is that even though just about all autistic people who can say anything about the matter have been saying for decades now that our perception is different, most people (who aren't into the perceptual research) just remember the "orange column" stuff and don't listen to us.

Anyway, our sensory issues are way more than just being annoyed by something. They actually impair our ability to function in environments that nonautistic people have no problem with. And sometimes they can cause at least some instances of the behavior that gets written up in diagnostic criteria.

What do you think "persistent preoccupation with parts of objects" is doing in the DSM if not for the fact that we're literally perceiving the world differently through our senses?

Also, most people only read the short form of the DSM diagnostic criteria. I'm no fan of the DSM, but many people here seem to be, so I'll even note that sensory issues are mentioned in the DSM section on autism. It says "There may be odd responses to sensory stimuli (e.g., a high threshold for pain, oversensitivity to sounds or being touched, exaggerated reactions to light or odors, fascination with certain stimuli)." See http://www.soulselfhelp.on.ca/autism2.html for the entire DSM section on PDDs in general (as in the long descriptions, not the short criteria that most people only read about). But be aware that some parts of that have been found inaccurate or are at least contested in more recent research (for example the percentage of autistic people with an intellectual disability). I'm surprised to note that it even describes how many children with "autistic disorder" have higher expressive than receptive language, which was a huge discrepancy for me growing up but I didn't realize it was officially recognized as happening a lot.

Also, people often talk about our "resistance to change". That's not always simply a compulsive stubbornness, it often has to do (even sometimes when we don't directly realize what the cause is) with "sensory issues" as well (and also with some complex problems with "executive functions" and other such things at other times). For instance, I find it extremely, extremely difficult to function if I am removed from a familiar environment and put into an unfamiliar or even just less familiar environment. There's a reason why. In familiar environments, my brain has already mapped out the basic layout of the room in a sensory way, through all of my senses. I know what things look like, what things sound like, what things feel like, what things smell like, etc. This allows me a heightened ability to function in this environment, because my brain can only understand sensory stimuli very slowly. I mean... I get the sensory stimuli quickly enough, and I feel them, see them, smell them, extremely rapidly, so rapidly that it overwhelms my entire mind. But with that huge bunch of sensory stimuli to process it is very hard for me to come up with the meaning of all that information. So I can only come up with a bit of information at a time. In a familiar environment, the information is all stored in my head so I don't need to do it fast. But an unfamiliar environment?

Get me in an unfamiliar environment, and all kinds of things start happening. My brain is overwhelmed with new stimuli from every single sense. Imagine floodgates opening and crashing through my brain to understand the violence of this. Anything else my mind might have been doing is swept away in the flood of information. I experience excruciating pain, not exactly in my body, but almost like in my mind or something, it's hard to explain but it's just as bad as body-based pain. Because for half my life now I've been prone to motion sickness, I often become "seasick" from all the visual jumble dancing around, and I may vomit violently just the same as someone does on a boat (someone described it once as being like something she'd never seen except in someone extremely drunk -- I'd just moved into a new apartment and she was helping me and then suddenly had to clean up my puke). There's no sense to be made out of any of this information, it just swirls and dips and dances, it doesn't form coherent patterns yet. I can't find my mind or my body in the jumble. Eventually my senses shut off. One or more of them just vanish. Sometimes it's all of them. And I'm just left... nowhere, really. No mind and no senses and no body (I perceive my body as if it's just external sensory input anyway), just awareness.

The "fun" isn't done when I come out of this. Once I end up in a safe, familiar location and lie down, something painful and discombobulating starts happening to my mind. It's almost (I'd have trouble believing it's as simple as this, but this is what it feels like) as if there's a buffer zone that contained all the sensory information I wasn't perceiving directly at the time. This buffer starts spitting out sensory data into my mind. I then perceive these things as if they are happening to me again. There's no difference, and I can't remember that I'm really just lying down on a bed somewhere. I just... feel all the sensory information as if I'm still in the place where I picked it all up. It happens in spurts. I'll go back to just barely noticing I'm lying down and then there's another spurt. It's highly painful, like a burning sensation accompanies it most of the time. When I'm done, there's a blank space for awhile, and then I find that I'm lying on a bed and usually I've drooled all over the place.

All kinds of things can happen when I'm still in the unfamiliar place and disoriented by all the sensory information. Sometimes I'm not really bothered by the sensory jumble, no pain exactly, nothing like that. It's just there. Only, my mind isn't there, not my idea-mind, just my sensory-awareness. I may end up pulled towards some kind of sensory experience. Only, I'll walk into the middle of the street because I don't know what a street is at that point, I just see something shiny and it attracts me. I'll be unaware of the concept of danger, of people, of streets, of violence, of anything that could cause me trouble, and I'll be operating on a set of rules that's purely sensory and not based on ideas. That other set of rules won't necessarily help me survive in that kind of environment. (For me, mind is a temporary thing that only happens when it's both possible and something I can put effort into. Much of the time it's not possible, much of the time I have no effort to put into it or no desire to put in the effort even if I have the effort.)

I have never heard of this happening to a nondisabled person just because they left their apartment. Never. When I "react badly to change", it's often something like this at the heart of it. (This has only gotten more extreme as I've gotten older. I used to be able to at least sort of function in more places than I can now.)

The combination of differences in my sensory processing, and my tendency to live in the sensory rather than in the idea-mind... that stuff is the bulk of the experiences that I happen to find important about being autistic. Yes, I have the same social difficulties that lots of people on this forum have. They just don't affect my life nearly as much as sensory/perceptual differences do. And many times my social difficulties are at least partly a result of my differences in sensory processing. It's just a much bigger effect on my life day to day. Because most people I deal with on a regular basis are either aware of how to deal with most of my social differences or autistic themselves. Social stuff happens but not nearly to the extent sensory stuff does. Social stuff only happens around people, after all. Sensory stuff is every second of every day. And it's way, way more than just not liking certain foods.

ETA: Argh, the chart didn't necessarily display. If you're having trouble seeing it just follow the link to my friend's article and the chart will be linked to from a thumbnail version in the article.

People with sensory processing issues have a longer sensory memory than usual.

I will go back and read the thread now.