Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi.
Started a logon here because a long and frustrating search of the internet yielded... so much nothing.
My apologies if this has already been addressed here, and I simply have not found the discussion. If that has happened, could someone point me to the relevant thread?
Is there a connection between sensory disturbances/hallucinations/psychedelia and autism?
I ask because I experience quite a lot of them-- I would not categorize most as "hallucinations" as I know perfectly well they aren't "real", but rather (mostly)visual disturbances: Shiny gnats, rippling floors, halos around objects, persistent afterimages, sound-->visual synaesthesia, geometrics that sort of leap out of the random distribution of things like leaves and sand, "motion" in stationary objects, visual snow, that sort of thing. All the time, since childhood. I am a prodigious reader, but slower than average at it, because the words will not hold still on the page, text tends to shimmer a bit, and there's always a bit of flash and color going on amongst the words.
I've always felt it was part and parcel of the autism, but have failed to find anything in the literature about it, other than some brief studies noting that migraine and synaesthesia are more common in autism than in the general population, and that our senses tend to be abnormally calibrated-- poor sensory filtering, over- and under-sensitivity. But never any specific descriptions that resemble what I'm seeing. Watching the floor ripple gently is specific and memorable enough you'd think someone would have mentioned it. My husband, also autistic, doesn't experience anything like it. The only place I can find anything remotely accurately descriptive is in the drug literature-- people describing their LSD and psilocybin trips. I have never tried any illicit drugs, so this is irritating beyond belief. I would like to be able to compare notes with people who experience similar phenomena, mostly from the practical standpoint of... like, have other people found ways to get to a *less* psychedelic state, so as to be more functional in the physical world? I feel like if I had some control over it, I could be a safer driver, pay better attention to conversations, and be generally less overwhelmed by sensory input. Talking to self-proclaimed psychonauts about this is not helpful, obviously, since they are chasing that experience, rather than looking for ways to muffle it. They are also prone to finding meaning in the experience, whereas for me it is generally a sensory-only thing. I don't find it meaningful any more than most people would find listening to radio static meaningful. It's just noise, it's mostly unwelcome, and it's an obstacle I have to work around to do ordinary things. Like read.
So. I have some questions about that.
1) Do other people with autism experience this kind of sensory disturbance? It'd be useful to know, either way. If it goes with the autism, I'd know where to ask about it. And if it's a completely separate thing, I'll know to keep looking :)
2) If yes, are there any ways to make it... less intrusive? Is there any way to turn the volume down?
I can't speak for everyone regarding your sensory disturbances, but I've read about individuals on the autism spectrum who have described similar visual disturbances. It's interesting how our sensory perceptions can vary so much.As for ways to make it less intrusive, it might be worth exploring techniques used by people with sensory processing sensitivities.
Might do. I'm no expert, but if you get text shimmering or colour moving about a page as you read, I'd get a suitably qualified optometrist to check for Irlen's.
One way you might get a clue yourself is to look through some coloured plastic. If that's making a difference, it might be an indicator, albeit an optometrist would test properly for the right tint for you.
would this account for blue's and reds seeming to move slightly independently on an objects when moved slightly? used to sit and wobble book covers about as a child and watch as the different colours seemed to move about separately from each other. just assumed this was normal for everyone.
Helen Irlen also wrote a book called 'Reading the Colours', you might find that describes a lot of these phenomena
Thanks! I'll check out that lead and see if I can find anything helpful.
A lot of that sounds very familiar-- and yeah, it's stuff I see, but most of it's like a transparent overlay on the "real" stuff, and I can tell it's not real. Most, though. When the floors ripple, it doesn't look like an overlay. It looks like the floors really are rippling. But I still know it's not real.
Visual tinnitus is a good description for visual snow
Betony said:Shiny gnats, rippling floors, halos around objects, persistent afterimages, sound-->visual synaesthesia, geometrics that sort of leap out of the random distribution of things like leaves and sand, "motion" in stationary objects, visual snow, that sort of thing. All the time, since childhood. I am a prodigious reader, but slower than average at it, because the words will not hold still on the page, text tends to shimmer a bit, and there's always a bit of flash and color going on amongst the words.
Go see a qualified "school's optician" for this bit. You might well have Irlen's syndrome. I get all of the above. Not hallucinations, visual disturbance because the brain can't process the light spectrum properly. Colour and shimmering when you are reading is a big indicator - and you are well aware that this isn't real - so you aren't imagining it!
If it is Irlen's, the good news is a pair of specs with the right colour tint will at least calm that down, if not fix it for you.
You don't have to be either autistic or dyslexic to experience Irlen's, but they often go together
So have to start with the usual disclaimer - I a not diagnosed and still swinging between being absolute convinced I am on the spectrum then going the other way and completely doubting myself. So that's out of the way...
Yes to this. I didn't know any of this was unusual as a child but I have always had visual things such as after-trails, halos and closed eye hallucinations (coloured clouds floating around esp when trying to get to sleep). I also now have what I believe to be visual snow (very fine moving dots across all field of vision both eyes - I describe it as visual tinnitus (I also have permanent ~15KHz tinnitus). I used to find getting to sleep to be very difficult as a child - especially if I'd been doing something that evening that was over stimulating, I'd have this thing that was like a dream, but preventing me from getting to sleep quite often where I'd "see" two outlined square objects with curved edges which would get closer and closer and closer, zooming into my vision which when they got to a certain point would translate into a feeling of real discomfort and I'd have to open my eyes and I'd try going to sleep again and the same thing would happen, or I'd have circular "thoughts" (dream like visuals) going round in circles that wouldn't go away.
I get flashed of colours now and again in vision and also shimmering text, esp white text on black background. I find reading to me perfectly manageable but I'm slower than most and my eyes seem to move back and forth rather than just scanning left to right as I read.
I have permanently got "noises" going round inside my head, wither music or my own never-ending internal narrative. I remember being on long bus trips as a child and the noise of the motorway would be turned into music I could hear from the "white noise". I think this is a kind of pareidolia. Colours move about for me, If I have a book or picture that had bright red and blue on it, like blocks of colour and I move it about the two coloured areas seem to move slightly out of sink with the rest of the object. As a child I remember the "magic carpet" they used to have in C&A. It was a pattern of bright primary coloured blocks on a grey background and it used to look really weird to me - like it was 3D. I used to become obsessed with looking at it and stepping on the patterns which amused me to no end.
I don't know if this is exactly what you're talking about but yeah, some of this seems fairly normal to me.
I have loads of weird stuff going on to this day though. I don't know how to describe it. The daytime stuff is not like I'm seeing things, it's like a very visual imagination that in my head gets overlaid on what I am really seeing but I can tell it's not a part of what I'm seeing. I really don't know how to describe it. It's like a sort of heads up display in a way. A recent example of this was starting a new job a few years ago. I'm totally overloaded with new things people are explaining to me all the time. So I'm sat there with my new manager and he's going on about all these systems and I'm "seeing" like some manga cartoon patterns in primary colours zooming in, but it's like not really my vision, it's like I'm having a dream, you know how you see things in dreams but it's not quite seeing them like you see properly... well like that, overlaid on the head up display. I get this sometimes with listening to specific music (I also have some weird finger wiggling hand movements that happen with specific visuals and music or thoughts - again since being a toddler). I don't really know how to even start describing this stuff to people.
Anyway, sorry that was a bit of a waffle, but yeah. Whether this is linked or something else is anyone's guess tbh.
I don't think I ever properly considered that possibility, because my own father had epilepsy from a head injury. I have witnessed some of the weird altered states of consciousness that resulted, but... have never heard him report any of the funny visual anomalies. Then again, maybe he just doesn't talk about it.
At the very least, it's a new line of investigation. Thanks for the suggestion.
I've been wondering if there's any link between epilepsy and the types of symptoms you've described*. I experience some of those, as it happens. Both my aunt and I had head injuries caused by serious accidents, when young; she ended up with full-blown epilepsy whereas I didn't.
*Though, admittedly, there seems so much overlap between various conditions that mine is a mere guess - even a recent burnout included some of the symptoms.
Yeah, "under-researched" is, IMO, an under-statement.
I do get fairly frequent migraines, and the psychedelia do get more pronounced before, during, and after a migraine episode. But I've never been able to say, definitively, that it's a migraine phenomenon. I mean, I do once in a while get a classic migraine aura-- the whole scintillating scotoma thingy with the flashy crystal zigzag whatsits creeping around toward the center of my vision. That always seemed to be completely separate from the other stuff-- very well-defined timeframe of being not-there, and then there, and then gone again. Whereas the other stuff is there all the time.
Migraine and seizure are somewhat related phenomena, so that might be a productive line of enquiry. I'll poke at it and see if I find anything.
Care to elaborate about nootropics? That's not a topic I'm familiar with. Are there any primer-level resources you'd recommend for learning more?
I have thought a lot about this, and for a couple of reasons simply... I think schizophrenic hallucinations are a different thing. The primary manifestation in schizophrenia seems to be auditory hallucinations, which I do not experience at all, ever. In addition, with that disorder, there seems to be an overwhelming tendency to attribute meaning, personality, and agency to the hallucinations, which I also do not experience.
There was a time this annoyed me a bit. I belong to a religious tradition in which "religious experiences" are completely acceptable, so it'd be kind of nice, actually. But no. It really just feels like crappy neurology, most of the time.
Also, there's fairly convincing research indicating that the combination of schizophrenia and autism under the same label originally was... a pretty drastic blunder. Most mental diagnoses have some degree of overlap, with a fair number of people being diagnosed with more than one disorder, and there being a pretty good spread of comorbidities. But there's actually a very unusually *low* overlap between schizophrenia and autism-- almost as though they are mutually exclusive diagnoses. Interestingly, there's also some weird thing with congenital blindness, where among people who've been blind all their lives, incidence of autism is fairly high, and incidence of schizophrenia is almost zero.
Scott Alexander talks about it here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/blindness-schizophrenia-and-autism
It's a pretty fascinating discussion and well worth the read. I have no way of knowing if he's correct, or if his information is correct, but I'm convinced.
There's an incredible amount under researched with Autism. As you pointed out, it appears NT individuals can take psychedelics to experience nuances we might find normal.
I'm not a neurologist, but some things can be related to tiny and sometimes harmless seizers, so it could be worth getting checked out. Some could be migraines, but others could simply be crossed "wires" or even a wild imagination. from everything I've read, it seems we do use different resigns and areas of the brain to reason and perceive life. I might use the occipital lobe to visualise something while a NT friend thinks with a dialogue to internally talk through the same thing.
I have found nootropics helped with a sort of stabilising or clarity and focus. Could be worth just getting the visual snow and halos checked for a bit of ease. But we tend to not filter out incoming information the same, or dull our senses the same. A different salience network is one of the main theories around autistic being.
there is in schizophrenia, which shares many similarities with autism... and autism was actually once on the schizophrenic spectrum... so there could be with autism too seeing as the 2 seem to be pretty closely connected in some way, and literally in a way that they was both connected under schizophrenia before autism was split off from it by research and thought into it.