Sensory Etiquette
Gestalt Hearing
If someone asks to speak somewhere quieter, please comply. It is likely that they are struggling to separate background from forground noise and therefore cannot hear you in a noisy environment.
Perfume
Be careful about wearing your favourite perfume around people with sensory issues. If they are hypersensitive to smell, they may decide you stink and want nothing to do with you.
Sensory Integration
Could do with being less bothered by hypersensitivities? Try the Starfish Exercise for the Moro primitive reflex.
Deep Pressure
Providing deep pressure can be a good way of calming an autistic child down. Apply firm pressure to the shoulders or wrap the child tightly in a foam mat. Temple Grandin built herself an hydraulic ‘squeeze machine’.
Fascination
Some people become fascinated by some stimulus and can stay with it for a very long time. Things like listening to the sound of a mountain stream, or watching waves of the sea, or a bird, or the way light relects off a shiny object.
Hypo to Emotion
People who are hypo-sensitive to emotion stimulate their need to experience emotion by provoking conflict. They enjoy being around people who are arguing and may provoke that argument.
Fluctuation
Some children experience fluctuation in their senses. Sometimes hyper-sensitive; sometimes hypo-sensitive. This is very difficult to pick up on and requires detective work.
Useful hyper Sound
Sometimes hyper-sensitivity to sound is useful. Imagine a car mechanic who can tell what is wrong with an engine by listening to it.
Numbers & Synesthesia
If you have a child who remembers sequences of numbers such as on numberplates and/or has a really good feel for numbers, being able to do calculations lightning fast, then investigate synestheia.
Exposure Anxiety
Exposure anxiety: anxiety that is triggered when you expose something about yourself. This can be your name, showing you can do something, meeting demands as yourself. Praise the work, not the person. Create indirect command centred on what needs to be done. Often mistaken for PDA.
Sensing Emotion
Most autistic children can sense emotion directly. They know how you are feeling without you telling them - although processing of this may be delayed. There is no point teaching facial expression. It just adds to overload.
Anticipation
Some children get agitated when they can see a sensory overload in danger of happening and can concentrate on nothing else until it is sorted. Things like a ruler or book half on and half off a desk.
echo-emotica
Some people feel other people’s emotions as if they are their own. This can be confusing when the person does not know this is happening and thinks the emotions are their own. Even more confusing and distressing when the person cannot name their emotions.
Yucky Fabrics
To some people certain fabrics are intolerable. They may say ‘Yuck!’ on touching them. This can cause problems with adhering to dress codes, including uniforms. It can be difficult to predict which fabrics will be rejected.
Reflection
Some autistic people reflect other people. Then the other person seems themselves reflected, not the autistic person. As this tends to happen with people who have hang-ups, they tend to not like what they see. This can be an extremely dangerous situation for the autistic person.
Hyper to Emotion
People who are hyper-sensitive to emotion will avoid conflict. Children can get distressed when other people argue. You can be hyper-sensitive to both your own emotions and those of others.
Unable to Block Out
Some autistic people are unable to block out continuous sounds, smells etc. For example, they will not stop hearing the air conditioner, nor smelling your perfume, nor feeling their clothes against their skin. This can lead to sudden and seemingly unexplained sensory overload.
Sensory Diet
A sensory diet stimulates hypos and identifies calming stimuli. Stimulating the hypos tends to reduce hyper-sensitivities. Calming stimuli helps calm the whole system down. This can include a piece of fabric that calms, a calming playlist, irlen lenses, for example.
Eye Contact
Contrary to what most people believe, there is no requirement to make eye contact during social interaction. It is sufficient to look at the forehead, the tip of the nose, the mouth, the chin, or even just vaguely in the direction of the face.
Emotion: Self and Other
Some autistic people are unable to process both their emotion and your emotion both at the same time. They may be able to process one or the other. Both may be processed after a few hours, days, or weeks. This causes significant problems with social interaction.
Echoalia as a tool
Some autistic people repeat what you said back as a tool to help them process and understand what you said. It might buy them time, or the act of saying it may help with processing and understanding.
Stress and Senses
When a child is stressed or tired, their sensory issues will likely be worse than normal. Stress can be caused by a whole host of things including struggling at school, frustration, being bullied, not understanding what is going on, feeling different. Normal stressors of everyday life have an impact too.
Change
Most autistic people struggle with change, especially unexpected change, to some extent. This is because of difficulty with processing the change and working out how to respond. Many autistic people work out how to handle changes that happen often, and then appear to have overcome this difficulty only to be caught when something happens that they don’t know how to handle.
Fragmented Processing
Fragmented processing can be difficult to pick up on this. A child can process part of what is said to them, miss the next part, and then process the bit after that, etc. This leads to an incomplete understanding of what was said, leading to instructions being incompletely understood. In school, an intelligent child could be doing a lot of reading after school to fill in the gaps. In some cases, processing is only to a literal understanding, but others may process the bits they do process deeply.
Lack of Filtering
Some autistic people are not able to filter out unimportant stimuli, such as traffic going past, children whispering at the back of the class, pictures on the walls that have been there for weeks. This causes them to try to process too much incoming information leading to sensory hyper-sensitivity and overload.
Stimulate Hypos
Stimulating hyper-sensitivities will calm down the hypo-sensitivities. This is why some children find it easier to cope in a swimming pool. Where there are hypo-sensitivities, children will seek out activities that stimulate them.
Keyword Guessing
Some autistic people handle their processing difficulties by picking up on key words and phases in what is spoken to them and making an educated guess. This still just gets them to the literal meaning, but works quite well when the topic is familar. This technique can fall down spectacularly when the topic is not familiar. This is why autistic people prefer to talk about their interests.
Proprioception
Proprioception is the technical term for body sensing. This is sensing where your body, limbs, head, fingers etc, are in space. Those who are good at proprioception tend to be good at sports. However, proprioception also refers to internal sensing of pain, hunger, thirst, etc.
Anxiety
Anxiety is very common in autism. This is caused by fear of sensory overload, not being able to process what is going on, fear of not knowing what to do when something unexpected happens, fear that they said or did the wrong thing.
Irlen Lenses
Irlen lenses are coloured lenses, where the colour is chosen specifically to help someone process visual information. They can have the effect of calming the whole system down and also helping with sound sensitivities. Can help with intolerance of fluorescent lighting.
Synesthesia & Speech
If someone sees sound and words as different colours, then what will come out of your mouth will, to them, be a very distracting stream of different colours which may swirl in front of you and fall to the floor. Don’t be surprised if they have difficulty following what you are saying.
Intolerance
Is there a sound or smell you can’t stand? An autistic person can find a sound, smell, picture, material intolerable. Something that other people have no difficulty with. This is not amenable to desensitisation. Let them remove themselves.
Delayed Perception
Delayed perception is sensing something after a delay. Hearing a sound, or feeling a touch, or smelling something after a delay. Kind of like a delayed reaction to something.
Insufficient Inhibition
Some people struggle to understand what is said to them because they can’t keep their mind on the top. A word (milk) may trigger an association (cow), which triggers another association (holiday farm), which triggers another association (feeding animals) etc. Before you know it, the person is thinking about something completely different. Some association is important for understanding context - but not like this.
Delayed Processing
Some people may process for literal meaning at the time, but then process more fully hours, days, weeks, or months later. When processing is delayed by a comparatively short period, this just delays learning, but might be confusing when the person struggles with work in class.
Music Intolerance
A person may be love certain kinds of music but find other types intolerable. This can be very difficult to cope with given the almost ubiquitous piped music in shops. The person may not be able to tolerate certain shops for this reason. Music in gyms can have a similar impact making them inaccessible.
Fragmented Perception
Fragmented perception is perceiving in pieces. So seeing in pieces, feeling parts of touch, hearing parts of what is heard, etc. This is coping strategy for not being able to process all incoming information.
Prosopagnosia
Prosopagnosia is more easily known as face-blindness. Many people struggle to remember faces. This causes issues with social interaction as they find themselves talking to someone who clearly knows them, but they can’t place the person at all. This can lead to awkward situations.
Alexithymia
Alexithymia can be thought of as ‘emotion-blindness’, that is difficulty recognsing, understanding, and naming your own emotions. Note that this does not necessarily affect the ability to empathise with other people.
Honesty & Integrity
Many autistic people are very honest and have a high level of integrity. You will lose trust very quickly if you do not respect this and reciprocate. Many people like working with autistic people because of the lack of guile and the fact that you always know where you are with them.
Routine
Many people who have processing issues rely on routine to cope. Routine is predictable and means that there is less to process. This means they are more likely to understand what is going on and less likely to get overloaded. They need advance warning of any changes to their routine, and if possible to be involved with deciding on the changes.
Gestalt Vision
Gestalt vision is seeing a scene as a whole rather than a set of distinct objects. This means that someone may not be able to follow an instruction to open a window, for example, because the handle cannot be distingshed from the rest of scene. People with gestalt vision will notice if even a small thing is out of place in the scene.
Motor Planning
Motor planning difficulties cause significant difficulties with learning new physical actions. Actions have to broken down into tiny steps to be learnt. This can apply to learning any normal physical activity such as getting dressed, catching a ball, writing.
Depression
Struggling to do things that other people can do with apparent ease, can make children depressed. Many think that everyone else is better than them because they can handle sensory environments that they can’t. They don’t realise that their senses are working differently. Trying too hard leads to overload.
Dark Glasses at Night?
Someone who is very sensitive to light may well need dark glasses, or their tinted lenses at night to cope with streetlights and the bright lights of oncoming traffic.
Merging
Some people lose themselves in sensory stimuli. They merge or resonate with the stimuli. This can be patterns, colours, sounds, music, the feeling of physical activity. It can involve any sense. Merging can be used to shut the world out.
Super-sensory
Some people’s senses are so acute that they can sense things other people cannot sense. Such as what people are saying in a room several doors away, or they can smell gas when nobody else can smell anything. Or they sense people in a way that makes no sense to anyone else.
Shutdown
Shutdown is the quiet response to sensory overload. The person stops responding, may go and hide somewhere.
Meltdown
Meltdown is the explosive response to sensory overload or not being able to cope with a situation. The persom may scream, shout, jump up and down with hands flapping. This can look very like a temper tantrum. But the cause is different. This is in response to overload, not being allowed your own way.
Peripheral Vision
Direct perception such as looking at someone’s face, can be painful, overwhelming, or it could cause fragmentation. The solution is to avoid direct perception and not look at someone’s face. Instead the person will process what is peripheral to their field of vision. This means or looking somewhere else when talking to the person or talking to a toy instead.
Overload Exercise
To create sensory overload in nearly everyone in less than 3mins. Create teams of 3. Two people sits on their hands and try to have a conversation while someone else whispers in their ears. meanwhile 2-4 people make noise, wave arms around - and anything else to hand and generally try to distract as much as possible. Those having a conversation and those whispering are allowed to change places. Unlike autistic people, participants tend to stop when it gets too much. After the exercise, have a short break and then discuss what it felt like.
Sensory Exercise
Think about what the idea office space/classroom would be for you. Write it down. Then get together in small groups to design a space that would work for all of you. Write this down. Discuss sensory differences, how hard it was to find something that everybody would like.
Sensing Exercise
Sit quietly and listen to all the sounds you can hear, look around to see what you can see, feel your clothing. What did you notice that you were not noticing before? Now imagine what life would be like if you could not stop noticing noises, small changes to the room, feeling your clothes. How would you react? What would you do?
Sensory Memory Exercise
Think about a vivid memory. What do you remember best? Which senses do you find most memorable?