Published on 12, July, 2020
I find this so hilariously annoying and wonder if anyone else suffers this:
I have trouble putting small food into my mouth with my hands. I've taken up eating dry fruit and nuts lately and I miss my mouth a lot.
Would this be a trait at all? I'm clumsy as hell anyway.
These difficulties may be explained by what lies at the heart of the autistic experience. Atypical sensorimotor feedback loops that produce difficulties coordinating sensory input into effective planning and execution of movement.
These sensorimotor difficulties can account for reduced social attention in early development, which in turn has a cascading effect on the subsequent development of social and communicative skills.
Large parts of the cerebral cortex in the parietal and frontal lobes are involved in transforming sensory information into action.
Movement is performed to both execute a physical task and to collect sensory information. Without precise control of movement, sensory input will prove atypical. For an example, refer to the voluminous literature on the role of eye gaze in autistic individuals, and the generative repercussions for social cognition.
Other parts of the brain, such as the posterior parietal association areas, process visual and somatosensory input and also issue commands to motor areas. In fact many areas, including it has recently been discovered, the cerebellum, participate in sensory and cognitive tasks.
It is also not possible to ascribe top-levels of the Central Nervous System with particular tasks - motor, sensory or cognitive - it is a process of interaction that allows us to perform complex functions.
A similar interaction between interoceptive, exteroceptive, proprioceptive mechanisms and the environment is necessary to perform fine motor movements.
Information taken from:
The role of Sensorimotor Difficulties in Autism Spectrum Conditions. Online here.
The Central Nervous System : Structure and Function / Per Brodal. — 4th ed.
The Prefrontal Cortex 4th Ed., Joaquín M. Fuster
Thankyou, Graham.
For all my earlier goofing and making light of things, over the past few years I've been becoming more and more aware of how tightly bound the social and emotional effects of autism are with its deeper sensory and perceptual aspects.
I realise now, for example, that my attempts to mimic typical body language are far less successful than I once believed, because the problems with mirroring which I mentioned in my earlier post give me a false perception of how I look from the outside. And when I was receiving therapy for my alexithymia, I was surprised at first that there was so much emphasis on actively directing attention to my interoception; but I now know that my body is part of the reporting and regulatory systems of emotion. For cognitive empathy to work effectively, it might be said that "theory of body" is required in addition to "theory of mind".
I am interested in the neuroscience of sensorimotor processing as I experience visual, somatic, olfactory and proprioceptive hallucinations to varying degrees.
I find the classic Theory of Mind model lacking in plausibility, from both an experiential and theoretical viewpoint. Indeed, it is increasingly being challenged. I suspect that it, along with theories of excess testosterone and extreme male theory, are part of the reason that female diagnosis is so haphazard and seems so arbitrary.
Given the diverse global range of cultures, and the fact that cultural environments evolve far more quickly than biological evolution is able to, it would be prudent to consider social cognition as a process of ontogenesis rather than phylogenesis. More acquired than innate. Biological evolution supplies us with a toolkit to acquire social cognition in the ecological niche into which we are born. I think that social cognition - and to some extent executive function - is developed via sensorimotor interaction of body, brain and environment. In other words an embodied or enactive approach.
That's really interesting!
I remember that video - can't remember whether I spotted the gorilla or not.
In a sense we're all constantly hallucinating. The most detail sensitive part of the eye, the macula, is only a tiny part of our field of vision, so the scene before us has to be scanned in order to see all of the details. Yet our perception is usually that we can see detail throughout the visual field. We're not seeing the image from the eyes, we're seeing the "model" constructed in our minds.
The inverse of your experience would be inattention blindness, where we don't see something that is there because we're not expecting to see it. The classic experimental example is being asked to watch a video of people passing a ball around while counting the passes. Most people don't notice the man dressed in a gorilla suit who comes into the frame in the middle of the video, beats his chest, and then walks off again!
Glad it didn't last long.
It's so sad the way some children are treated. I don't understand parents who can't accept their children for who they are.
I've also read of the predictive processing model suggested as an explanation for the experience of deja-vu. In this case the prediction is a particularly close match for the outcome, but the prediction is also incorrectly perceived to have been a memory trace.
The child vision experience was distressing, fortunately it was short lived.
I think it was because I had been reading about some of the dreadful abuse some parents visit on their autistic children via quack remedies they find on the internet. My horror occasioned the hallucination.
It always shocks me how some parents describe their autistic child in terms of the child being possessed by a devil called autism, and proceed to search for exorcist like practices that will return the true child back to them.
The concept of synaesthesia really fascinates me - it's hard to imagine what it's like if you don't experience it. Love the reason for your choice of avatar - that's really interesting.
Was the child vision quite distressing for you, or did you just ignore it?
I've never heard of it, but I'll definitely read-up on it. That does sound like it'd make sense of the experiences I have. With the waiting room example, it wouldn't be unusual to see a room full of people, so I guess my brain could have just been preempting what was on the other side of the door.
I feel like I learn something new every day on this forum.
My hallucinations are almost always abstract. This is similar to my sound to colour/shape synaesthesia. My avatar is a painting by the artist Carol Steen of a hypnagogic hallucination. (Hypnagogic hallucinations visit one just before falling asleep, hypnopompic greet one on awakening). Carol Steen is a famous synaesthete (in the world of synaesthesia at least). Her artworks are pictorial versions of her synaesthetic experience. My sound to colour/shape synaesthesia is more of an abstract video accompaniment to music or voice. My visual hallucinations are of a single frame version of my synaesthesia.
Whilst I was on mirtazapine I started to have visions of child floating in mid air. The child had a particularly malevolent vibe to it. Which is not a vibe one usually links to children. I have come off mirtazapine and these visions have ceased.
You account is interesting. Have you heard of predictive processing? This is a theory associated with the philosopher Andy Clark. It’s a theory of cognition where the brain is continually creating predictive models of sensory input and comparing them to actual sensory input. A sort of top down, bottom up continual confluence of two streams. According to this theory - which is proving popular in human and robot cognition accounts - your brain is predicting something that is then updated when it isn’t matched by your sensory input. This would account for the fleeting nature of your experiences.
Thankfully, I don't tell everyone (I have a tendency to overshare, but not usually with things like this!). It tends to be my partner and family, because I know they won't judge and they're very used to my quirks.
It's really interesting to hear about how you experience hallucinations. I wonder if what happens to me is more psychological rather than autism-related. For example, I walked out of the therapist's office the other day and as the door opened, I thought the waiting room was full of people (thought I could see them sitting there). The second time I looked, there was nobody in there. I've also had an experience where I thought I saw a solid fence moving to make a kind of gateway. These things are pretty rare for me and usually happen when I'm tired, so I think it's just my mind playing tricks. They don't distress me in any way - they're just odd and I shrug them off.
Graham Slight Return said:I am interested in the neuroscience of sensorimotor processing as I experience visual, somatic, olfactory and proprioceptive hallucinations to varying degrees.
Snap! Much of my interest in the sciences of the brain developed because of my childhood discovery that some of the things that my senses reported to me seemed most unlikely to be part of the outside world. I get the impression that you have managed to learn rather more than I have, though!
DuckBread said:I've had some very odd experiences where I've seen things that aren't there at second glance.
You told people? Oh no, you shouldn't ever do that! At least, that's what I'd learned by some time in the middle of my childhood. My hallucinations and synaesthesia are, for the most part, very little bother at all and rarely have the slightest emotional or narrative meaning. But oh boy, do people get their knickers in a twist if you let on that you see, hear, or feel "things". I only opened up again when I discovered that there were other people daring to in autism forums.
FWIW, mine are pretty banal.
- Constant visual snow - like the "static" on an old tube TV, only more colourful, and more 3D looking. I'd guess that's pretty much what it is, just random electrical noise that would typically be filtered out,
- Geometries - I assume my brains edge-finding and background-foreground analysis trying to make sense of the visual snow, but incorporating edges from what my eyes are actually seeing. Like a cross between a wire-frame 3D model and fractals, but not very prominent unless I'm looking at a blank field of colour.
- Migraine Aura - I get full-on ocular migraines a few times a year, but some of the aura type hallucinations can pop up at amongst the others.
- Every once in a while one or more of the above will be resolved as a real world object as if viewed from askance - no different than someone seeing a jumper out of the corner of their eye and thinking for a moment that it's the cat.
- Auditory Hallucinations - proper sounds that take a moment to work out whether I really heard them or not. But they're always really short, banal snippets of real sounds that I've heard recently; so memory related, I guess. I will hear my name spoken or called sometimes - that's as near as it gets to "voices in the head" type hallucinations.
- Audio/Visual to Somatosensory synaesthesia - seeing certain movements, shapes, or patterns, or hearing certain sounds gives me the feeling that an external force is moving my body or internals. It's hard to describe because it doesn't feel "like" anything else. I imagine it as ripples passing through my body, or the feeling of a shape being inside my head (especially for tile and chequer patterns). Sometimes it will throw my sense of scale a bit or make me feel like I've changed size, so I might feel as if my feet might not touch the floor, for example. Sounds can also modulate the visual hallucinations above to some extent (not "seeing notes in the air" or anything as definite as that). It's far more structured and rhythmic than e.g. an "adrenalin rush".
I was born with all of them, so far as I know. They're just my "normal". The biggest common problem that I have with them is that seeing in dim light can be tricky, as the hallucinations can then dominate what I'm seeing, obscuring the image from my eyes. Nothing for anyone to get their knickers in a twist about.
What are the visual hallucinations like? I've had some very odd experiences where I've seen things that aren't there at second glance. I'm sure my mind's just playing tricks on me, but other people seem to find it strange when I mention what I thought I'd seen!