Autism - Sensory Overload

Portia Iversen explains that autistic individuals may be overwhelmed by sensory stimuli, finding it difficult to attend to sounds and sights at the same time.

One of the best sources of information we've had in autism about what’s really going on in the autistic brain has come from people with autism, a handful of whom have been able to tell us in detail what it’s like. Some of the more severely impacted people, and there aren’t many of these around, who cannot speak, but can handwrite or type, have described in detail that very early in life they were extremely overwhelmed by their sensory system. One boy, named Tito, who I spent a good deal of time studying, told us that if you ask him to look at your eyes while you’re talking to him, he can’t hear the words you’re saying.