I resolved all my sensory issues as a child, so my memory might not be the best, but I'll try to explain it anyway.
Most people are able to go through their lives without being consciously aware of many of the things that they do. After they learn to walk, their body remembers unconsciously how to stay balanced and they don't have to think about it, when they are hungry, their body knows it and tells them to eat, etc. The unconscious mind of a person with some form of autism is often not very smart. It might over-react to ordinary stimuli, or might not react to important things, like hypothermia. So to get along, someone with autism often has to be constantly aware of things that ordinary people don't have to think about, because their unconscious mind is not reacting appropriately to the world around them. My understanding is that what he described as a "strange attack" is a case in which the autistic person is overwhelmed by sensory input that really should be handled by unconscious parts of the brain.
Really you receive far too much data at any given moment to make sense of most of it, and there is something in you that decides what is important. If that isn't working correctly, then you receive everything at once. Maybe being autistic is like having an email that doesn't have a spam blocker, where there is 100x as much spam as email that you want to read, but you have to read it all anyway. Normal people don't understand it because they lived their whole lives with an efficient spam blocker.
This is unrelated, but could you tell me why you are attracted to him?
11 Jul 2013, 8:45 pm
