School Project Exhibition- Advice/Help Needed

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Hello all,

My name is Patrick and I am currently a senior attending Purchase College in New York for graphic design. For my senior project, I am creating an awareness campaign, website, and exhibition on the social difficulties that come with autism.

My basic platform is that autism can sometimes limit the interactions necessary to facilitate communication and relationships between one or more people. The goal is to make the general public aware of these difficulties and try to offer insight and solutions to social interaction. Hopefully, one would walk away with a better appreciation for daily contact and understanding between human beings.

What I need is better insight from people who have difficulties interacting with others: What things do you feel? How do you handle the situation? Questions like these I'm hoping to get a response to and help further my progress on my project.

The only interactions I've encountered have been with my 13 year old brother (who has Aspergers). The autism spectrum varies in my family, but I would like to hear from others. If anyone has any resources, advice, stories, or opinions on this particular subject of the social interactions in autism, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

In order to understand the social difficulties, one must first understand what Autism is, because the one causes the other - it's a Sensory Processing Dysfunction.

The constant stream of sensory data - light, sound, touch, taste, voices, facial expressions, body language, etc., that every human is exposed to on a moment-to-moment basis are not processed through an Autistic Brain in the same way they are processed through a Neurotypical Brain.

The neurotypical (NT) or 'normal' brain takes in this sensory data stream and automatically filters and collates the information and prioritizes it - assigning a sort of 'psychic volume' to each element according to it's importance. Some sensations are Urgent, others just Important, still others Unimportant or Irrelevant and so on, so that the individual knows which ones to focus on and which can be safely ignored.

The Autistic Brain's filtering mechanism is impaired. All signals tend to come in at more or less the same 'volume' and the brain is forced to manually interpret and delineate, causing some signals to be misinterpreted and some to be missed entirely. Since Nonverbal Social Signals are among the most subtle of sensory cues, deciphering facial expressions and body language are especially problematic.

The Autistic Brain may completely fail to recognize a meaningful attitude of posture in the person they are interacting with and instead be distracted by a small sound coming from another room. Often the Autistic Brain finds eye contact uncomfortable, because focus on another person's eyes or face can be so distracting that one fails to hear and process what the person is saying.

Due to the lack of 'volume' control, the Autistic Brain is easily overwhelmed by too much sensory data coming in too quickly. Frequently there is a literal lag-time between our receiving a social cue, interpreting it's meaning and determining an appropriate response. Often trying to participate in a group conversation is like trying to jump onto a fast-moving Merry Go Round.

IMO, it's important for people to understand these things in order for the quirky behaviors of High Functioning Autism to make some contextual sense, just as it's easier to understand Dyslexia as a learning disability by knowing how visual signals get crossed up in the brain.