While studying the different topics of sensation and perception it made me wonder about how people with different disorder, such as autism, experience the world. There are many different types of autism, but I was interested mainly in Asperger's syndrome, since my older brother has this specific type of autism. While most people assume that people with autism have different sensory disorder, few realize how severe these sensory disorders can be to the people who experience them every day. People with autism tend to not want to be touched, because of the sensory overload that they experience. According to Albano (2008), this is primarily due to the fact that the nervous system does not process sensory information correctly, so autistic people tend to feel overwhelmed by all the sensory information they are feeling. In addition to having trouble processing sensory information, many people with autism find it difficult to read visual clues, especially in social settings where there are large crowds. Many assume that having autism means having a disability and while there are struggles such as handling all if the visual and sensory overloads, in many cases autistic people have high or above average intelligence (The National Autistic Society, 2011). In my brother’s case he is very high functioning, but has issues when it comes to sensory overload and when having to interact in a social setting. He mainly has problems reading basic social cues, such as if a person is happy, annoyed, or mad, which many people can recognize without any problems. Overall, people with autism are not necessarily “disabled” but they have a different brain structure that affects how they perceive different situations.
~ Lauren Bonham ~
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