I had some difficulties today and found this article helpful. I'm a bit confused right now so am not sure if the following excerpt might help anyone in a small way, or not, or is even really relevant to Autism. But it was interesting to read, for me at least:
'Ultimately, the convincing perception of reality that we each enjoy is actually a highly complex illusion. Experiences feel real to each of us, yet not one is objectively correct. That doesn’t stop people trying to argue that their subjective perception trumps that of others.
This shading of different realities is only the start. It gets more fascinating – and much weirder. It’s one thing to allow that there might be an alternative perspective on colour, but quite another to accept that colour doesn’t actually exist outside our brains. Not only is there no colour, but there’s also no sound or taste or smell. What we perceive as red, for example, is just radiating energy with a wavelength of around 650 nanometres. There’s nothing intrinsically red about it; the redness is in our heads. What we think of as sound is just pressure waves, while taste and smell are no more than different conformations of molecules. Although our sense organs do a splendid job of detecting each of these, it’s the brain that construes them, converting them into a framework for us to understand that world. Valuable though this framework is, it’s an interpretation of reality and, like all interpretations, it’s subjective.
With so much information flowing in, demanding immediate attention, how does the brain keep up with it all? The answer is that it doesn’t. It filters the information in its perpetual quest for what’s important. If you’re sitting down now, you’re not likely to have registered the pressure of the chair against your back, or the clothes against your skin – at least until you read this sentence. This isn’t the brain being lazy, it’s separating the important from the irrelevant. The downside is that the brain often misses subtleties, which is how dextrous magicians manage to fool us.
In ancient Greece, there are records of philosophers descending into caves to induce hallucinations, in the hope of gaining insight. Given time, the light show can sometimes develop into more fantastical waking dreams. Underlying all of this is the brain’s frantic efforts to build its internal model, even though the sensory information it needs to construct that model has been cut off. The results are odd, though to some they can feel disturbingly real.
But what is reality, and, more generally, what does it mean to be alive? However we might try to answer this, it’s fair to say that even our most eloquent attempts fall short of fully conveying the ridiculous, magnificent, miraculous experience of being. Our senses are at the heart of all this wonder. They are the interface between our inner selves and the outside world. They equip us to perceive beauty, from great art to the grandeur of the natural world, and to appreciate a sip of an ice-cold drink and the sound of laughter. Senses are, in short, what make life worth living.'
More:
www.theguardian.com/.../self-and-wellbeing-it-takes-all-53-of-our-senses-to-bring-the-world-to-life
