I think it was something like three to five out of 75 people (so like 5%).
Two of the three people I’m thinking of didn’t tell me all that much detail. Most of my model of what’s going on at least some of the time comes from talking in more depth with just one of them. That’s nowhere near enough information to make any remotely confident generalized claims; but it did seem like enough to include a note of caution.
I think most of the people likely to run into this kind of trouble are autistic. According to my model (which is roughly the “weak central coherence” theory), autistic people are dealing with way more sensory information most of the time, because their top-down processing is relatively weak compared to their bottom-up processing. They’re not pruning stuff like normal. It just hits them all at once, and they can’t organize it.
(I don’t know why I’m saying “them” as though I’m not such a person.)
Departing now from standard stories about how autism works, and veering into my own speculation.
It seems to me that autistics tend to choose one of two strategies for coping with this. (I’m using “choose” very loosely here. It might happen when we’re two years old.) Either we let everything in and become the “primarily sensory sensitive” flavor of autistic, or we dissociate and become the “primarily sensory insensitive” flavor of autistic. (It’s more complicated than that; most of us don’t fall cleanly into one category or the other in every circumstance.)
Some of us freak out when an ambulance goes by, and can’t think straight when there’s a coke can in the same room because it keeps making tiny bubble sounds, and can tell you in great detail about the sensations happening on every inch of skin. Like me.
Others of us are hardly ever aware that our bodies exist, may not notice you’re calling our name when we are standing right next to you, and spend most of our time “with our heads in the clouds”. (IME the clouds are often programming, math, or writing fiction.)
According to my story, sensory insensitive autistics have learned to live whatever-kind-of-life-they-have while constantly ignoring almost everything that’s happening to them. They’re not the only sort of person like this; plenty of neurotypicals also have their heads in the clouds almost all of the time. The thing is, head-in-the-clouds neurotypicals are still pretty much fine if they let through a bit more bottom-up data. It’s not what they prefer or are comfortable with, but their basic way of processing information does not rely on never doing this. It doesn’t threaten to break them.
Sensory insensitive autistics, though, depend on this extreme strategy for basic survival. When guided to make a move that would let in the flood—the flood that I constantly swim in, but that they have no practice coping with head-on—they can immediately tell that they’re in danger of drowning, and they go NOPE, NO THANKS, DO NOT LIKE THIS.
I think it was something like three to five out of 75 people (so like 5%).
Two of the three people I’m thinking of didn’t tell me all that much detail. Most of my model of what’s going on at least some of the time comes from talking in more depth with just one of them. That’s nowhere near enough information to make any remotely confident generalized claims; but it did seem like enough to include a note of caution.
I think most of the people likely to run into this kind of trouble are autistic. According to my model (which is roughly the “weak central coherence” theory), autistic people are dealing with way more sensory information most of the time, because their top-down processing is relatively weak compared to their bottom-up processing. They’re not pruning stuff like normal. It just hits them all at once, and they can’t organize it.
(I don’t know why I’m saying “them” as though I’m not such a person.)
Departing now from standard stories about how autism works, and veering into my own speculation.
It seems to me that autistics tend to choose one of two strategies for coping with this. (I’m using “choose” very loosely here. It might happen when we’re two years old.) Either we let everything in and become the “primarily sensory sensitive” flavor of autistic, or we dissociate and become the “primarily sensory insensitive” flavor of autistic. (It’s more complicated than that; most of us don’t fall cleanly into one category or the other in every circumstance.)
Some of us freak out when an ambulance goes by, and can’t think straight when there’s a coke can in the same room because it keeps making tiny bubble sounds, and can tell you in great detail about the sensations happening on every inch of skin. Like me.
Others of us are hardly ever aware that our bodies exist, may not notice you’re calling our name when we are standing right next to you, and spend most of our time “with our heads in the clouds”. (IME the clouds are often programming, math, or writing fiction.)
According to my story, sensory insensitive autistics have learned to live whatever-kind-of-life-they-have while constantly ignoring almost everything that’s happening to them. They’re not the only sort of person like this; plenty of neurotypicals also have their heads in the clouds almost all of the time. The thing is, head-in-the-clouds neurotypicals are still pretty much fine if they let through a bit more bottom-up data. It’s not what they prefer or are comfortable with, but their basic way of processing information does not rely on never doing this. It doesn’t threaten to break them.
Sensory insensitive autistics, though, depend on this extreme strategy for basic survival. When guided to make a move that would let in the flood—the flood that I constantly swim in, but that they have no practice coping with head-on—they can immediately tell that they’re in danger of drowning, and they go NOPE, NO THANKS, DO NOT LIKE THIS.