Is Aspergers just extremely high latent inhibition/focus?

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I'm going to second what they've said.

Living doesn't make me feel nervous. I have fears of people, but am not generally anxious - while anxiety is a common co-morbid, I very strongly only have social anxiety, not general anxiety. The feeling isn't nervousness or anxiousness, its overwhelmed. There's a big difference between anxiety and being overwhelmed even if they can present in similar manners which are visible to others.

Maybe it is just two different ways of interpreting the same thing. Normally when people say they are overwhelmed it is because they have a lot of things that they are worrying about or are bothering them. Part of what I'm trying to understand is the autism and schizophrenia are opposites idea. It seems like schizophrenia involves low LI, but to me autism involves very high LI. Autistic creativity seems to stem from the ability to focus and absorb a great deal of information and schizophrenic creativity stems from the ability to generate many ideas, observe unusual things, etc...

I am saying that I am overwhelmed because I have a lot of things that I am taking in. Not necessarily worrying about, because its not worry or anxiety or fear, its mental processing, but overwhelmed because of a lot of stimuli. Lots of input -> Low LI.

Right, but there are people who take in everything, but don't feel overwhelmed by it. That's what I am trying to get. Being stimulated is normally seen as a good thing, as opposed to being bored. There are people who could tell you that they notice every little sound and sensation, but that it does not bother them. That is why I am saying that it seems like irritability or nervousness.

Getting migraines is not "irritability or nervousness". I know what its like to be irritable, as well as nervous. It has nothing to do with my default state because of being alive. I know people well who have general anxiety problems. That's not me.

There's a difference between being stimulated and being overstimulated. No, most people don't take in everything like I do, they don't have nearly strong enough senses for it. I see things others don't see, hear things others don't hear, taste things others don't taste, and smell things others don't smell. There's also a difference between being stimulated and being able to filter what's relevant and not have the rest interfere even if they are noticed, and the inability to have that filter.

It'd make sense if ASDs are associated with both extremes, but for me it absolutely is associated with taking in every tiny detail about the world, including those that most people's vision isn't good enough to see, and those that most people's ears can't hear, and most people's noses can't smell.

For me, its hypersensitive senses combined with processing every last detail about every last thing and not being able to combine them correctly or filter out what is relevant and what isn't relevant.

Does this theory of yours apply to autism or is it just exclusive to AS?

I get overstimulated by my senses too and I can tell you it's different from nervousness around people. I can get overstimulated by noises in the home and bright lights. It's probably hard for a person to understand if they don't have as sensitive senses. It's got nothing to do with feeling nervous around people but because of information going into every sense at once. People normally have a brain that focuses on which sense is most important and can turn the rest down. This is why NT's can follow a conversation in a crowded restaurant and I just hear noise.

Stimulation isn't always a good thing. I have ADHD and when I'm too hyper I can't settle on a sing task because I experience everything at once. And that drug addict feeling is right. It's not simply I get distracted but things serve as distractions when I'm trying to get some focus in the first place. Some days I'm understimulated which also makes it hard to focus. Over stimulation can also lead to seizures which personally I don't find is a good thing.
Sometimes I can focus so much that I forget things going on around me (but never in public, unless I had a shutdown because my brain got so overloaded it slowed down), even the music I'm listening to, which I put on to help me focus because it's too loud outside my room.

With me I intensely focus to block out all the extra stimulation, not naturally but as a coping mechanism. I use that method when I'm overloaded in a supermarket, just focus on one thing.

Autism is a very broad spectrum and no two individuals with it are the same. I also don't think it's the opposite of schizophrenia either like many people think. There are far too many variants of it. I don't think there can be a single reason to explain something that is not a single disorder but made up of many.

The way you come off it's almost like you are saying, 'This is the way it is, there's no other explanation' and you are shooting down every comment that says otherwise, even though overstimulation is well known on the autism spectrum.

I might just add that studies have shown that the areas int he brain that activate in NTs when they socialise does not activate for people with autism. I tend to tell people I don't have a social brain which is partly true. But like I said, this may not apply to all on the autism spectrum, just those who never had a desire to socialise.

It's more likely that the "irritability" and "nervousness", as you put it, are a direct result of simply being overstimulated; hearing, seeing, and feeling at such heightened degrees may sharpen or dampen the ability of those with AS to remain focused, or shift focus elsewhere, as any individual case dictates. Being constantly bombarded by environmental stimuli, thereby disrupting or intensifying focus, thus promotes sensations of "irritability" and "nervousness" that further complicates processing of information, which necessitates the need to stim in order to avoid meltdown/sensory overload. Social anxiety may play a part in some small measure, but I doubt that the social environment contributes as much to sensory overload as the environmental stimuli, themselves. I've only encountered as many shutdowns as can be counted on one hand, thankfully, so I can't even begin to comprehend the toil lower functioning individuals must go through on a daily basis. It would kill me were I in their shoes. Though I don't think that your hypothesis is completely without merit.


Edit: This just occurred to me: Perhaps stimming is merely the exaggeration of one type of sensation over the competing sensations in those who experience hypersensitivity, drowning out or blanketing the others through repetitive stimulation of just one type of sensory stimulation, thus allowing the brain to focus on just that single sensation to the exclusion of all others.

I've often thought that most of my autistic problems are to do with my being too slow to shift my focus from one concept to another. It would explain social ineptitude, executive disfunction, and poor uptake of lectures.

How much a person is going to be able to cope with is closely tied to their cognitive abilities. Not simply IQ score but especially "executive functions" (I think working memory is included in EFs yeah?)

As for there being people who are aware of "everything" and can function just fine, that's the one thing I'd disagree about. I've never met such a person.

I have one of the highest thresholds of people I know but the whole "I'm human too" thing always has me hit my limits at some point as well. Being aware of many things at once doesn't always bother me. It is being aware of too many things than my brain can process correctly without significant stress that starts to bother me.

My experience is that normal people get bothered far quicker. Many of them have less processing capacities to cope with stimuli they become aware of - but the stimuli normal people notice is much much lower. They do have a much better capacities to selectively handle in-coming stimuli.

So that in the end, to the outside observer it doesn't look as if I'm able to cope well with my awareness of a lot more stimuli than them.

I do imagine that AS doesn't always come with the same level of "low" or "high latent inhibition". An all encompassing theory would therefore be difficult to establish.

This is mainly what I was trying to say, is that intense level of focus that can in some ways be an advantage can also cause problems.

[quote="pensieve"]Does this theory of yours apply to autism or is it just exclusive to AS?

[/quote]

My experience is more with AS so that is what I am commentating on.

I've run out of fingers and toes on which to count my shutdowns.

OP: I still think if you really want to understand autism/AS you need to look at the differences between the autistic brain and the NT one. That way it's not just one theory that explains it but each individual may fit into it because of the uniqueness of each brain, even the ones with the same developmental problems. And every other peculiarity you have with your brain or body or behaviour can be explained by it. The way I see it if you have unusual brain development then you're going to have a whole host of issues, some that can't be explained by what you're diagnosed with and if it's severe enough then you've got a co-morbid disorder.

Most things we have in common on this spectrum is lack of social awareness, which could be not knowing how to read body language or understand the intention of others. I like to say 'not having a social conditioned brain so we can't pick up on these invisible rules.'

We have poor control of our emotions.

We have rigid interests and thought patterns.

The frontal lobes regulate emotion, social understanding and executive functions like coping with change and planning and organising and all that stuff.

The limbic system is where the real emotional regulation comes from. The amygdala which is known to be bigger in autistic brains is the emotion centre and where our instincts of fear come from. The autistic brain is prone to anxieties and paranoias. Personally when something bad happens to me it will take a lot of effort to put me back into that situation because that's all I'll think of. I'll see the moment so visually, almost like it's happening all over again.

If I were to have my own theory on autism it would be an unaroused frontal lobe and lack of communication between the rest of the brain. That way you can still have sensory issues, narrow thinking, social problems, fear of change, etc.

I like to think the repetition in autism to stem from that fear of change. I feel so relaxed by repetition, whether stacking objects, doing the same routine day in day out or from stimming.

I'm a little bit rusty with my knowledge in neurology, so I may have got some things wrong.

It's not irritability or nervousness. It's like, for me, every bit of sensory stimulation (all the sounds, all the lights, all the movement, the sense of where people and objects are relative to me, up vs. down, the clothes I'm wearing, any sensations on my skin at all) adds to a certain amount of clutter in my brain. Eventually my brain reaches clutter capacity and I shut down (about once every other day, when I'm in good shape). It happens whether I'm irritable or in a good mood, it happens whether I am nervous or calm. Emotions can bring it on faster because there's only so much processing one brain can do. I realize what you say it sounds like to you, but you are speaking from theory, and Tuttle is speaking from experience. And this is my experience.

I don't think the HI/LI thing is really explanatory of autism. It seems like autistic traits are divided into both HI and LI categories and then a dichotomy is offered where any given brain is one or the other to some extent, and I can't visualize this in any way that makes sense to me, because it requires excluding information in order to make my brain fit, and I don't see the point of that.

I tend to think of the Aspie brain as a juggernaut and the NT brain as a small car.....the NT can manoevre in a tight space, but the Aspie can pull a bigger payload.

The clutter is a really good description. I don't view it as such, but that's a good way to get across the idea of there being just so much that its no longer being processed right and is just too much. Another metaphor that works is something clogging because of just too many things trying to go through at the same time.

Interestingly enough I've found that certain feelings don't seem to add to the 'clutter' because while they are another input, they are also one that forces me to organize the inputs better (so it comes out minimally ahead on the 'clutter')- the only two I have found that help this are deep pressure (I'm absolutely obsessed with being held tightly) and the feeling of water affecting large amounts of my body (both swimming and being in a kayak trigger this, neither of washing my hands or being in a canoe do).

There are certain things that lead to sensory overload easier because of emotional triggers, but they don't cause me to be irritable, I just lose the ability to process things because of being upset. Certain voices trigger that, because they're both people who upset me, and voices that have always been too loud and too harsh, such that even on their own, without other voices, they seem like a bigger input.

As a whole though, it is for me how Verdandi describes. There are so many things constantly, and my body can only process so many, and when it reaches more than that my body either blocks out processing all together in order to reassign mental order (shutdown), or I overflow and lose control of everything (meltdown). Meltdowns from sensory overload are rare for me, shutdowns are much more common, but the low levels of sensory overload that I have near constantly certainly affects all my meltdowns.

It really does feel like I get mentally clogged by a system that was meant to have fewer things flowing through it at a slower rate than I perceive the world.

Clutter is my favorite metaphor for the experience, but it is more accurately described, I think, as "noise" or "static" in the system. As the static increases, signal decreases, until the signal vanishes beneath the noise, and the whole system has to clear itself and restart. While this happens, I have practically no short term memory, no working memory, and limited access to long-term memory. I don't experience emotions psychologically but can experience them physically (I had a complete shutdown in December during which I could feel my body displaying all of the signs of anxiety but I didn't feel any anxiety at all). What is going through my mind is either strictly what I can sense or random images and sensory impressions that, as far as I can remember, aren't very coherent.

I agree about certain feelings - like pressure - helping with the processing. It's interesting to bring that up, relative to things like Temple Grandin's hug box. I think weighted blankets help with this (I have a heavy comforter on my bed year around because of this, although not as intense as what Tuttle describes).

I remember when I went from not really thinking about my senses being oversensitive to realizing that I spend nearly all of my time in some degree of overload. There are times I have to turn off the light in my bedroom, or the fans because I'm skating the edge of system burnout or collapse. But most of the time I'm dealing with a certain level of static and have to work around it to interact with other people, to do things that I need to do. I try to minimize it, but there's no real way to stop it entirely.