Dr. Greg Siegle's 'Sensory Sensitivities in Autism: From Narratives to Neuroscience'

On Thursday, April 11th, 2024, Dr. Greg Siegle about "Sensory Sensitivity in Autism: From Narratives to Neuroscience" as part of UPMC's Autism Acceptance and Neurodiversity Celebration Month.

This talk was coordinated by UPMC Western Behavioral Health and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council.

#celebratediversity #celebrateneurodiversity

[JonBrase]

In computing, there are often tradeoffs between throughput (total work done per unit time) and latency (time for a given unit of work to be completed). A system optimized for high throughput often has trouble guaranteeing fast and consistent responses to input (in particular, even if the average case response is fast, the worst case can be pathologically slow), and systems optimized for response time are often have considerably less throughput.

Is there anything in the neurological data that might suggest something similar going on in autistic brains? If we have a setup where there is a lot of work begun but not completed at any given moment, and where new sensory input cancels work in progress and sends it back to the beginning, in favor of processing the new input, then a lot of sensory input might keep interrupting work before it's completed, resulting in only the first stages of the metaphorical "assembly line" ever receiving anything to work on and very little coming out the other end, unless sensory threshold levels are turned down so far that interruptions are rare.

[Catlily]

I dislike eye contact even with my boyfriend I feel safe with. It makes me feel exposed and like lasers are looking at me. I can stand eye contact for a second. But I don't like it.

It is interesting that positively stimulating one sense helps cancel out the negative sensory input of another sense.