Reading the Research: Peering into the How of Sensory Sensitivities

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article gives us some insight into what causes sensory sensitivities.  Unsurprisingly if you're familiar with how I define autism, the cause is found in the brain.  

Typically when I speak about sensory sensitivities, I'm not talking about visual ones.  This is because I mostly don't suffer from them.  However, there is actually a wide variety of these sensitivities.  I wrote about them in depth a couple years ago.

As a quick refresher (and for folks that really don't have time to read the linked article), there are at least five forms of visual hypersensitivity:

1. Light sensitivity, which can cause pain when looking at or near LEDs, sunlight reflected off snow, fluorescent lights, camera flashes, and glare from basically any bright light source.
2. Contrast sensitivity, which can make black letters on a white page blur together.  Needless to say, this causes great difficulty when reading.
3. "Tunnel reading," which is difficulty reading groups of words or groups of letters together.  It can be hard to move from line to line on a page, which naturally also makes reading a headache.
4. Impaired print resolution, where the letters on a page or computer screen are unstable, shimmer, or move.  There are a lot of ways to make reading misery, aren't there?
5. Environmental distortions, which is similar to impaired print resolution, except not limited to print.  The whole world, including stairs, faces, furniture, and even flooring can shimmer, vibrate, shift, or warp in your vision.  

This study sought to discover what causes these conditions, and found that autistic brains don't moderate themselves very well.  The visual input basically comes in at full force, and rather than tone it down to make it usable, the brain just... gets buried in it.  We can also be more distractible in terms of the motion of large objects.  Finally, they suspect autistic visual areas-of-focus may be smaller than neurotypical ones, meaning some of us may have a sort of "tunnel vision" effect.

It seems this team is likely to try to flesh out their findings, so we may get more specific answers as to what's going on with visual sensitivities.  Hopefully, with this understood, treatments could be created for people who suffer from these symptoms at a high level.  

Someone like me, who sometimes suffers light sensitivity but is mostly unaffected, wouldn't need such a thing.  But a person whose whole world is constantly warping, shifting, and shimmering could hardly focus on school, making friends, and pursing their interests.  

Much of scientific progress is incremental, but I have hope, someday, for less suffering for everyone.  

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)