People with autism have trouble processing sight, sound

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From Simons Foundation
http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/confe ... ight-sound

This is news? I thought that was well established.

I often answer spoken questions several seconds after they are asked, particularly if I'm in a busy place. I don't "hear" the question until after it's been said. I also don't "see" things when I'm in busy surroundings. Once, a man was thrown to the ground by security guards just two feet away from where I was sitting, and I didn't notice for several minutes.

This is not about processing sight or sound by itself, but multisensory integration of speech, in which autistics have less difference than NTs (but difference in same direction) in blood flow to one brain region in synchronous condition when auditory and visual stimuli match up vs. asynchronous when they are mismatched by a certain time delay.

I have considerable difficulty listening to someone talking with me "live," while I'm on the phone with someone.

I just can't listen to more than one person at a time.

I would never be a good court stenographer, for that reason.

I'm still not completely certain what we're talking about, but I have a lot of problems in shopping malls. I can't process everything and I miss a lot of details. It feels like being a horse with blinders on.

This is true from experience. The more stimuli is around, the longer I would take to process it all. ugh

This means that when you are watching someone speak and listening to someone speak at the same time, an area of the brain has increased blood flow compared to when you are watching someone speak and listening to someone speak with a time delay between the lip movements and the speech sounds. In NTs, there is greater blood flow increase than in ASD, which shows small increase.

To those of us living autism (first-hand or vicariously) this is more like validation than news.

To the rest of the world, I can see it being a revelation.

Certainly that is about how I feel in a shopping mall: Like "normal" people say they feel watching a movie with the sound out of sync. That doesn't bother me much, because I have to work almost that hard to match it all up ALL THE TIME.

Maybe it does do something for us (other than restating what is, to us, patently obvious): Gives us another way to try to explain life through our/ our kids' eyes to Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Suzy, and the general rest of the world.

Thanks for providing this piece of news. I have CAPD and the research is relevant. I am a senior Aspie and I have never grown out of this challenging processing condition.

I would add smells and textures.