Parallel Worlds - Created by Differences in Sensory Perception

"What I do realise is that I do not see the world as others do. Most people take the routines of life and day-to-day connections for granted. The fact they can see, hear, smell, touch and relate to others is 'normal'. For me, these things are often painfully overwhelming, non-existent or just confusing" (Wendy Lawson)

In recent decades there have appeared different conceptions of autism which highlight sensory-perceptual abnormalities as the basis of core features of the disorder. Some researchers describe autism as a disorder of the senses rather than a social dysfunction, and hypothesize that all symptoms of autism are simply a consequence of the brain injury that makes brains of autistic children perceive inputs from the world differently from non-autistic brains. Thus, abnormal perceptions might give rise to high levels of anxiety, this, in turn, results in obsessive or compulsive behaviors, thus making the more commonly accepted criteria (impairments in social interaction, communication and imagination), in fact, secondary developmental problems (Delacato, 1974).

Though it is probably not as simple as that and the syndrome of autism is a far more complex phenomenon to be explained by differences in sensory experiences, sensory-perceptual problems DO play an important role in autism.

Everything we know about the world and ourselves has come through our senses. However, we are not born with ready-made strategies to perceive the world around us. Thus, vision or hearing, for example, means the ability to receive sights and sounds, but this ability does not mean to comprehend visual and auditory images. We have to learn how to see and hear with meaning. Through interaction with the environment we develop our visual and auditory processing skills, learn how to discriminate different stimuli from chaos of sounds, shapes, patterns, movements, and learn how to connect sensory images with meaning.

If one (or several) of the senses are lost (e.g., blindness, deafness), the other senses develop to compensate and create the balance. However, the sensory-perceptual worlds of blind/deaf people are very different from the sensory-perceptual world of people without these disabilities. For instance, the blind live in a tactile/auditory/olfactory world without any visual images. This is by no means a dysfunctional world. It is rather a completely different world. Instead of visual images they have tactile-motor-auditory-olfactory concepts. The blind compensate lack of vision by other senses (often very acute) and reconstruct their 'visionless' world rich of 'sound pictures', 'tactile images' and olfactory perceptions that is very difficult for sighted people even to imagine.