What causes autistics to experience pain & sensation so much more acutely?
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The autistic brain does not filter to the extent an allistic brain. Imagine if every sense you had was not filtered. You can always feel your clothes, you can always hear the lights, you can always see everything around you. It is overwhelming.
Between being overwhelmed with all of this and not being able to filter out whatever the stimulus is that is pushing you over the limit, the sensations seem much more dramatized.
Wow, I can barely handle a spicy burrito, imagine feeling everything at max level all the time.
It’s because of a condition that can exist independently from autism, but frequently coincides with it, which is Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). Such people can be hypersensitive (more sensitive), or hyposensitive (less sensitive) to things affecting their senses. Those who are _hyper_sensitive to touch are more likely to have an adverse reaction to pain and physical sensations. Much like autism, people aren’t sure what causes SPD.
In people without autism, their brains prune (trim, remove) synapses that we no longer need as we grow. Synapses are connections between nerves and cells that send messages to each other. So when we learn or sense anything, a synapse forms.
However, there’s a lack of this pruning in those with autism. So everything you learn, see, feel, observe, and take in, your brain becomes overloaded with that and it doesn’t always get rid of what they don’t need. It’s like a bush that doesn’t get trimmed in our brain, taking over (imagine the roots as the nerves, the branch as a synapse and the leaves as the cells). The unnecessary synapses take over and make life really hard, as their senses are continuously overwhelmed.
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