3. Hypersensitivity
Hypersensitivity has different levels in the AS person.
The first level:
The best known is that of highly developed senses. The easiest description is to speak of sensitivity ‘outside the norm’. There are positive and negative consequences. You can imagine them. The positives: intense observations are possible, powerful and very subtle sensations; all the senses are so sensitive that they take us into unknown dimensions, listening to environmental sounds with all these senses. The negative: being bombarded and overwhelmed by sounds, smells, light, textures and tastes that are too strong. The AS person often has to wear protection, glasses, noise-cancelling headphones, soft, special, close-fitting clothing to regulate temperature (a very complicated subject). Hearing conversations far away in the house, following them word for word, hearing tiny noises, the floor creaking two rooms away, hearing every little sound others make with their mouths: it can end in ‘misophonia’, becoming agitated and feeling hatred and anger rise out of all proportion.
I have heard the sound of a firefly's beating wings and the crackling of an ant's legs as it climbs a tree.
It is the management of auditory information and ultra-concentration, discerning things undetectable to a normal ear, that make the AS person exceptional.
‘One day, as he looked at the starry sky, the impression of the depths of the universe in all its dimensions and movements entered him through all his senses and into his consciousness, and he felt at one with the universe.’ He was only seven years old.’
The second level:
feeling other people's emotions, being enveloped and overwhelmed by the emotions, desires, frustrations, feelings and moods of others. Reading other people's unconscious, the layers of other people's dreams.
He had a rather scientific way of seeing things; at secondary school, it was mathematics and engineering sciences that really excited him. What was he to do with all these feelings and emotions of others that poured into him? They had found no place in his universe. He read the emotional problems of almost all his teachers on their faces. He felt them on his skin and everywhere, like a pollution of the senses. ‘Nothing to do with this bloody mess of intrusive impressions and information’; he would rather not look at all, know nothing, not know them, and slam the door, run away, erase, forget, throw all these impressions into the deepest well.’
The third level:
The third level is mental, involving the ability to read and sense thoughts and intentions.
A damned load of information that occupies the AS person's living space and that they cannot manage. Because they must first think and feel their own thoughts and emotions before making room for other people's images and mental clouds, and extracting correct data from them.
Other people's thoughts troubled him, put his own thoughts in jeopardy: an overflow of opinions, visions and vague ideas. ‘If only they could think a little more clearly, in a more organised and precise way, it would have caused fewer problems, but not this jumble of thoughts going in every direction, like a discussion interrupted by words without reason…’ So difficult to concentrate, to keep one's own thoughts clear.