Facial tics

Could it be a response to sensory overload? If he is having trouble keeping on top of daily stresses, he might be experiencing what I've termed elsewhere "fading" or "phasing-out" where you appear to lose awareness.

Also if as you say he is not sleeping properly he may be overly tired during the day and falling asleep all the time and trying to fight it.

Although I've discussed fading with others who have it, it doesn't seem to be discussed much on here, so I may be talking the most awful nonsense. But really all I can offer is my own experience.

I often find if I'm trying to listen to someone, especially when there is background noise, I find my concentration lapsing part of which is a feeling my eyes are closing (though presumably if that was happening I wouldn't be able to see). So I react by trying to keep my eyes open. I don't know what it looks like, so cannot say if anything happens physically that others would notice. But it occurred to me to suggest this as what you describe your son's eyes doing is what I think i'm doing .....if that makes any sense.

As a tutor I had a reputation for being a good listener, and seemed to be sought out by students to hear their problems. Partly I suspect I didn't "jump the gun" and butt in with a homespun explanation before the student had finished explaining, which I observed colleagues doing, often missing the point. Students don't tend to come to you with simple oversights or standard mistakes, you have to hear them out to understand properly.

But I also suspect that because I had to work so hard at listening it looked to them as if I was paying attention. In reality I suffered terribly from this fading or shutting down process, and often lost track of what they were saying and then had a difficult "reading between the lines" struggle to recover the thread.

But it is not explained anywhere, certainly not on NAS pages, so maybe it is totally unconnected with my asperger diagnosis, but then again I cannot find an explanation anywhere else. Needless to say it is not covered by the Triad of Impairments - the bible of autism experts.

But it does make logical sense if you look at sensory overload in terms of a bottleneck or Digby Tantam's "bandwidth" theory.

Could it be a response to sensory overload? If he is having trouble keeping on top of daily stresses, he might be experiencing what I've termed elsewhere "fading" or "phasing-out" where you appear to lose awareness.

Also if as you say he is not sleeping properly he may be overly tired during the day and falling asleep all the time and trying to fight it.

Although I've discussed fading with others who have it, it doesn't seem to be discussed much on here, so I may be talking the most awful nonsense. But really all I can offer is my own experience.

I often find if I'm trying to listen to someone, especially when there is background noise, I find my concentration lapsing part of which is a feeling my eyes are closing (though presumably if that was happening I wouldn't be able to see). So I react by trying to keep my eyes open. I don't know what it looks like, so cannot say if anything happens physically that others would notice. But it occurred to me to suggest this as what you describe your son's eyes doing is what I think i'm doing .....if that makes any sense.

As a tutor I had a reputation for being a good listener, and seemed to be sought out by students to hear their problems. Partly I suspect I didn't "jump the gun" and butt in with a homespun explanation before the student had finished explaining, which I observed colleagues doing, often missing the point. Students don't tend to come to you with simple oversights or standard mistakes, you have to hear them out to understand properly.

But I also suspect that because I had to work so hard at listening it looked to them as if I was paying attention. In reality I suffered terribly from this fading or shutting down process, and often lost track of what they were saying and then had a difficult "reading between the lines" struggle to recover the thread.

But it is not explained anywhere, certainly not on NAS pages, so maybe it is totally unconnected with my asperger diagnosis, but then again I cannot find an explanation anywhere else. Needless to say it is not covered by the Triad of Impairments - the bible of autism experts.

But it does make logical sense if you look at sensory overload in terms of a bottleneck or Digby Tantam's "bandwidth" theory.