The personal accounts of autistic individuals reveal that one of the main problems they experience is their abnormal (different?) perception and many autistic authors consider autism as largely a condition relating to sensory processing. Temple Grandin (1996) suggests that there is a continuum of sensory processing problems for most autistic people, which goes from fractured disjointed images at one end to a slight abnormality at the other.
The real world and the perceived world (i.e. our mental image of the world) differ. Though we live in the same physical world and deal with the same 'raw material', differences in sensory functioning create invisible walls between autistic and non-autistic people. The metaphorical descriptions of children and adults with autism, such as 'aliens', 'Martians - become factual! They do live in a different world! The same stimuli look, sound, feel, smell differently for them. When we want to show our love and affection by hugging the child, he pulls away as the pain from the touch is unbearable. So what is our interpretation? - 'He doesn't love me'. We are 'deaf' to the sounds our child cannot tolerate (e.g., sounds of fans working, kettle boiling). We are 'blind' to a 60-cycle flickering of fluorescent lights that makes the room to pulsate. Just because we are 'deaf/blind/dumb, etc.' to the stimuli our little 'alien' perceives with extreme acuteness, we describe his behaviors as bizarre, odd, inappropriate. However, as the systems work differently their responses to sensory stimuli are 'normal', though different and unconventional for us, living in a parallel world.
The sensory problems in autism are often overlooked. As children literally live in a parallel (differently reconstructed) world and are misunderstood (= mistreated), they are likely to display behavioral problems, such as self-stimulation, self-injury, aggression, avoidance, rigidity, high anxiety, panic attacks, etc.
The so-called low functioning autistic individuals may have near-normal brain trapped inside a sensory system that does not work properly, and, as a result, not enough undistorted information gets through, it may be that the child's abnormal sensory functioning leads to secondary abnormalities in the brain development because of distorted sensory input or lack of sensory input (Grandin, 1996).
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