For people on the autism spectrum, the world is a bewildering place. With oversensitive sensory systems, they battle to process the maelstrom of information flowing into their brains. Often the result is sensory overload, leading to signature behaviours such as tantrums, anxiety and social withdrawal.
Autistic individuals, who perceive and process sensory inputs differently than neurotypicals, may also have trouble filtering out background noise, spot patterns more quickly, or be particularly sensitive to certain smells or tastes.
Associative Thinking: Most individuals on the spectrum are associative thinkers rather than linear thinkers. In other words, one thought connects to another and so on through sometimes loose or seemingly irrelevant connections.
Researchers have shown that people with Autism are up to 3 times more likely to have hallucinations.
Many autistic people experience hypersensitivity to bright lights or certain light wavelengths (e.g., LED or fluorescent lights). Certain sounds, smells, textures and tastes can also be overwhelming. This can result in sensory avoidance – trying to get away from stimuli that most people can easily tune out.
People with autism spectrum disorder are sometimes said to lack empathy (the ability to feel along with others) and/or sympathy (the ability to feel for others). While this stereotype is often used to describe all people with autism, these challenges are not experienced by everyone on the spectrum.
Many people with autism have difficulty looking people in the eyes. However, a lack of eye contact does not automatically mean a person has autism.
Children with autism can sometimes have difficulty understanding the concepts of physical space and personal boundaries, both as it relates to them and to other people. It is nevertheless important that children on the spectrum understand and feel comfortable about their own bodies.
A tendency to avoid eye contact is an early indicator of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and difficulties with eye contact often persist throughout the lifespan. Eye contact difficulties may underlie social cognitive deficits in ASD, and can create significant social and occupational barriers.
People with autism tend to have insomnia: It takes them an average of 11 minutes longer than typical people to fall asleep, and many wake up frequently during the night. Some people with the condition have sleep apnea, a condition that causes them to stop breathing several times during the night.
For example, studies have found that people with autism tend to have more gray matter in certain areas of their brain than neurotypical individuals do. Additionally, different regions of the brain may communicate differently in people with autism compared to those without.
Keise Izuma, first author of the study, called the effect "extremely clear." This suggested to the research team that individuals with autism do not think about, or care, what others think of them. It is perhaps simply not a part of their social reasoning and thought process.
Many autistic people have intense and highly-focused interests, often from a fairly young age. These can change over time or be lifelong. It can be art, music, gardening, animals, postcodes or numbers. For many younger children it's Thomas the Tank Engine, dinosaurs or particular cartoon characters.
An autistic person will feel emotions and will want to communicate emotions to those around them. However, it is not uncommon to encounter difficulties in expressing oneself. Indeed, people with autism spectrum disorder will encounter certain obstacles in recognizing various facial expressions.
People on the spectrum may have trouble recognizing their own emotions, or they may feel emotions more intensely. “There might be some biological differences in the arousal systems in the brain,” Beck says.
Many autistic people enjoy spending time alone and consider it important for their wellbeing.
They may avoid interactions or eye contact or even resist parental attention, hugs, or cuddling. There has been more research into the reasoning behind this, but many times it results in people with autism being defensive against touch.
— The ability to recognize faces varies greatly, but individuals with autism spectrum disorders can especially struggle, having huge implications for social interaction. Penn State researchers, for the first time, recently analyzed 40 years of autism data to determine deficits in face recognition.
Autistic people often prefer to view inanimate objects over people interacting. This atypical gaze pattern may help clinicians flag autism before other traits appear. The average age of diagnosis in the United States is 4 years.
An area of the brain known as the dorsal parietal cortex shows less activity when someone who has ASD makes eye-to-eye contact compared to someone who does not, say scientists from the Yale University School of Medicine.
Some of the frequent facial features of autism are a broader upper face, shorter middle face, wider eyes, bigger mouth, and the philtrum [19]. The use of facial features as a physical marker to detect autism is one of the most exciting topics in autism research.
Autistic people need a full night's sleep to get even close to enough REM sleep. When you fall asleep, you cycle between NREM and REM sleep. During NREM sleep, your brain moves memories from short-term storage to long-term storage.
In previous studies, children with autism have been found to have unusually wide faces and wide-set eyes. The cheeks and the nose are also shorter on their faces (Aldridge et al., 2011).
While some people with autism merely yell or stamp, many really do become overwhelmed by their own emotions. 3 Bolting, hitting, self-abuse, crying, and screaming are all possibilities. These can be particularly frightening—and even dangerous—when the autistic individual is physically large.