Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm filling in an online assessment form for autism and quite a few of the questions are about smell, i'm not sure my sense of smell is that extreme, but in general is it the idea that autistic people's sense of smell is more or less accute than your average man in the street?
It's just checking sensory issues. Some autistic people have problems with being overly sensitive to certain aromas, causing nausea, headaches etc. Some have an acutely heightened sense of smell so could, for example, tell if a smoker had been in someones house, even if they hadn't actually smoked in there. Not all autistic people will have the same sensory issues. Some will have issues with smell, others won't have any problems at all. All autistic people will have some sort of sensory issue, be that with smell, light, touch, noise, but they don't have to have all of them.
They actually CAN have all of them! Many do and don’t realise.
Heightened sensory experience would’ve been a normal human evolutionary trait - these “tools of calculation” are for safety.