Sensory Gating in Autism, Particularly Asperger's
Sensory gating is an issue in autism, schizophrenia and ADHD. It is the neurological process of filtering out redundant or unnecessary stimuli in the brain; like the child who sits in his classroom and gets bothered by the noise of the clock on the wall. He is unable to filter out and ignore this sound. He becomes preoccupied by the sound and cannot concentrate on his work. There are also sometimes advantages to not filtering out environmental stimuli, because you would have more situational awareness and notice things that others miss. An example of sensory gating is the fact that young children are not waken by smoke detectors that have high pitched siren, but are waken by a recorded human voice telling them there is a fire and to wake up. There may be times when sensory overload in autism is not a case of too much volume from each of the senses, but rather too many inputs being processed by the brain, instead of some just being ignored. It is more a cas...