How does the 'Intense World Theory' make sense?

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When:

. Sensory issues can occur outside of autism, even standalone
. Sensory hyposensitivity exists
. Many autistic individuals do not have crippling sensory sensitivity
. There is no real scientific evidence to support what the theory postulates

I think the "intense world theory" has to do with being overwhelmed by sensory things in general, and having a relatively "extreme" reaction to what most people would consider "normal" sensory things. I should add being overwhelmed by too many sensory things coming at one particular moment.

I believe this is applicable in at least some cases of autism/Aspergers.

I believe this applies in my case. I believe I was overwhelmed by "normal" sensory things until I started speaking. Then, eventually, as I got older, through the cognition enabled by my speech (i.e., through communication with the outside world), I became better able to handle "normal" sensory input--and only became overwhelmed by "too many things at once." This continues to this day.

I thought the intense world theory was born out of brain studies that showed areas of hyperconnectivity in autistic brains -- did I just imagine that?

How does the existance of sensory hyposensitivity negate the possibility that sensory hypersensitivity or neurological hyperconnectivity could give rise to autism symptoms?

How does the fact that sensory issues can occur outside of autism negate the possibility that sensory hypersensitivity or neurological hyperconnectivity could give rise to autism symptoms?

I don't understand why people keep looking for one theory that will explain all cases of autism. It seems unlikely that there would only a single cause.

The intense world hypothesis was based on valproic acid (VPA) rodent model of autism, showing brain differences such as hyperconnectivity between VPA-treated rodents and control rodents. Also based on small number of case studies of human babies with fetal valproate syndrome or fetal anticonvulsant syndrome showing autistic behaviors. The babies had mothers who took VPA or other anticonvulsant drugs during pregnancy, and the babies were later diagnosed with autism. The hypothesis is also based on the teenage child of the researchers who came up with the hypothesis, the child is diagnosed with AS and always had hyper behaviors, the child was hard to diagnose as the parents took him to multiple clinicians who gave different diagnoses before one clinician diagnosed AS.

Currently, there is little human brain/behavior/cognition research to support intense world hypothesis. There is a lot of media attention, and a lot of attention from other researchers in autism research, but it is still an largely unstudied and unproven hypothesis. It is questionable how well the VPA rodent model represents human autism, or how well fetal valproate/anticonvulsant syndrome represents autism spectrum, or how well the researcher's child represents AS or high-functioning autism in general.

Ah, so I did imagine it. Thanks for the info btbnnyr!

I don't believe there is, or will ever be, an all-encompassing theory which will explain all autism.

This. Autism is probably similar to epilepsy in the sense that many different genes/factors can cause epilepsy and lower thresh-hold in the brain to produce seizures.

Autism does seem to be a condition where your social circuitry is not typical. And like in epilepsy, this can happen in many ways (genes, epigenetics, environment). Orphans who were deprived of social interaction also display autistic like symptoms.
It seems like autism wires the brain in a way that socializing is not natural...i.e. you are sort of trapped in your own little world, and you will develop self soothing techniques...which seem to come in the form of stereotypies, repetition...etc.

Whether these circuits are under-connected or overloaded (or as Simon Baron-Cohen thinks...if you are a dude), the result is the same. Interrupted transmission.

Last edited by zoidbreezy on 02 Jan 2015, 3:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thank you, Sir:

A most understandable statement about autism and "alternative wiring."

And my intuition says that this is a fine explanation.

Now...put on your "serious doctor" look!

It's not just sensory issues, it's a more fundmental, internal wiring thing. Anyway, my sentiments is no one autism theory works because autism is no one thing.

Here is a somewhat detailed article which supports what might be called "the intense world theory." The article is written by Gregory Hickok who is a professor of cognitive science at University of California, Irvine, where he directs the Center for Language Science and the Auditory and Language Neuroscience Lab.

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/01/we_might_have_autism_backwards_what_broken_mirror_and_broken_mentalizing_theories_could_have_wrong/

For me the intense world theory explains my situation. It is not that I am always overwhelmed by all sensory issues. I can handle a rock concert or a firework display or a trip to Time Square and very much enjoy myself. For me the "intense world" means that a great deal of anxiety from life itself that causes me to retreat into my own world and to also engage in repetitive self-soothing behavior. I have not come across any other theory that explains autism - or most autism as well for me.

Why do many - probably most of us have difficulty or at least have a history of difficulty making eye contact? Why was I unable to make eye contact at least in a sustained manner until my mid to late 20's and only got it down pat in my mid to late 30's? Well, speaking for myself - because it was a very, very intense experience along with many other experiences of ordinary life that felt very, very intense. I have a feeling that this is the experience of most other people on the Spectrum who have or have had difficulty making eye contact.

This from the article I sited above:

Do You See What I See?

One other indicator of hypersensitivity is staring us in the face, literally. Autistic individuals seem to perceive less in facial expressions than nonautistic individuals, and the part of the brain that is partial to faces, the fusiform face area, responds less well in autistic folks. The first-pass (and most popular) interpretation of these findings: autistic people can’t read faces because their neural face area is poorly developed. A research team in Pittsburgh scanned Temple Grandin while she was watching pictures of faces and nonface scenes and found exactly this result. Grandin described her experience in the scanner while lecturing at UC Davis’s MIND institute in 2008 (CAPS indicate emphasis in Grandin’s phrasing):


Now [researcher] Nancy Minshew did another brain scan and she found I was more interested in THINGS than I was in looking at pictures of people. . . . She starts showing me all these weird videos of people, airplanes flying over the Grand Canyon, bridges and apples and all kinds of objects. And I’m looking at this [thinking] where did she get this 1970s video? How many copyright violations do we have on this video? Why was I looking at the THINGS? Because the THINGS told me more information about where the tapes came from. And I was trying to figure out what the experiment was all about.

If all you did was analyze the brain scans it would look like Grandin’s face area is dysfunctional. But, it is clear from her recounting of the experience that she was attending more to the nonface pictures, which could easily produce the observed results even if her fusiform face area (FFA) were perfectly normal (attention modulates the neural response). You are wondering whether the reason why she was more attentive to the nonface pictures is because her face area is dysfunctional in the first place. It’s possible, and it is the standard explanation of both the brain response pattern and Grandin’s behavior, which is more object- than face-oriented. It’s not the only possibility, though! It could be, for example, that her FFA is hyperreactive, which leads her to avoid attending to faces, which results in more attention paid to nonface objects, which leads to the observed imaging result. Or maybe she’s just smart enough to recognize that the THINGS tell you more information, as she noted, in the context of the problem she had tasked herself with during the study, to figure out the goals of the experiment.

At least one study has confirmed that alternative explanations of the face processing “dysfunctions” in autism may be on the right track. Autistic and nonautistic individuals were scanned using fMRI while they looked at pictures of faces that were either emotionally neutral or emotionally charged. Crucially, using eye-tracking technology, the researchers also monitored which parts of the images their participants were looking at during the experiment. Overall, autistic participants activated their fusiform face region less vigorously than nonautistic controls, replicating previous work. But the eye-tracking data showed that this was simply because they spent less time looking at the most informative region of the faces, the eyes. In fact, when the researchers looked at fusiform activation as a function of time spent fixating on the eyes in the photos, they found a strong positive correlation in the autistic group. This means that the autistic brain is responding quite well to face stimuli, if one takes into account the amount of time spent looking at them.

Again we might ask the same question we asked previously, why aren’t autistic individuals looking at the most informative region of a face in the first place? If it’s not a general face processing deficit, maybe it is a facial emotion processing deficit that limits their ability to detect information in the eyes. According to this view, the face processing system in general is working OK, reflected by the activation in the FFA when autistics actually look at faces, but because autistic people can’t process the emotion in them, they don’t spend as much time looking at the critical regions compared to controls. As before, this is a possible interpretation. But again, it’s not the only interpretation. An alternative is that autistics don’t look at the eyes as much because of a hyperactive response to emotional information, which is particularly evident in the eyes. And consistent with this alternative possibility, the same study reported that amygdala activation was stronger in the autistic compared to the nonautistic group while looking at faces.

Also consistent with the alternative, emotional hyperreactivity hypothesis are statements from autistic individuals themselves. Here’s a sample gleaned from a paper covering face processing in autism: It’s painful for me to look at other people’s faces. Other people’s eyes and mouths are especially hard for me to look at.

My lack of eye contact sometimes makes people, especially my teachers and professors, think that I’m not paying attention to them.

—Matthew Ward, student, University of Wisconsin

Eyes are very intense and show emotions. It can feel creepy to be searched with the eyes. Some autistic people don’t even look at the eyes of actors or news reporters on television.

—Jasmine Lee O’Neill, author

For all my life, my brothers and everyone up ’til very recently, have been trying to make me look at them straight in the face. And that is about the hardest thing that I, as an autistic person, can do, because it’s like hypnosis. And you’re looking at each other square in the eye, and it’s very draining.

—Lars Perner, professor, San Diego State University

These are revealing statements for two reasons. First, they provide a clear indication of an intact theory of mind in these individuals (“my lack of eye contact . . . makes people . . . think that . . .”). And second, active avoidance of eye contact provides just as much evidence for sensitivity to the information contained therein as does active engagement of eye contact. If you can’t recognize that there is information in the eyes, why avoid them?

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/01/we_might_have_autism_backwards_what_broken_mirror_and_broken_mentalizing_theories_could_have_wrong/

Similar experience in my case.

When I was a child no one talked about AS. Interestingly, I recall medical doctors and my parents labelling me as hypersensitive.

At the time I thought hypersensitivity related to asthma and related allergies, but in hindsight I think the label may also have been used to describe my behaviour in social contexts. I certainly found all social interactions to be very intense, and even today I find social interactions extremely draining. There is always an undercurrent of low level anxiety, even if I seem very calm on the surface. What has changed over the years is that I have accepted the anxiety as a fact of life, and it no longer prevents me from interacting if I have too.

I have never understood the supposed ToM issues associated with AS. Some autistics can be experts at recursion and games such as Chess. As far as I can see, ToM issues in AS are limited to social and emotional reasoning. These issues may result from a lack of desire to conform with cultural norms, and a significant underestimation of the role that social status plays in typical society. Ian Ford's book "A Field Guide To Earthlings" explores the topic of social status in society in depth, and it allowed me for the first time to understand the "logic" of neurotypical reasoning.

A while back I conducted a poll on WP on the perceived need for hierarchical forms of social organisation. More than 40% of respondents did not believe that a social hierarchy is an essential structural element in the operation of a large scale society. It makes perfect sense that ToM reasoning by people who ignore social hierarchies differs from ToM reasoning by people for whom social hierarchies and social status are essential parts of their identity. Furthermore, corresponding differences in establishing and maintaining social relationships provide a good explanation for recurring frustrations on both sides, and for otherwise unexplainable perceptions/accusations of "rudeness".

I have no problem making eye contact during staring contests, or any activity in which I focus only on looking at someone's eyes, I don't find it emotionally intense at all.

But I naturally don't make eye contact when interacting with people, it doesn't happen unless I focus only on it, which is impossible during interaction, I forget all about it during interaction.

To me it feels more like a pleasurable piece of fiction rather than something real. It provides generalized statements and ideas that appear to suggest connections without actually having any solid scientific basis. It's like they grabbed a prominent feature of autism and decided it could be causing all the differences, and I don't really see it as being any different to other theories or ideas like autism as a 'predictive disorder' etc.

The theory presumes that the autistic brain is too hyper (in almost every way) to maintain itself, and that's all there seems to be to it, from what I've seen.

I brought up hyposensitivity in the OP in part because the name is 'Intense World', where it would actually seem to be the opposite for a person with the relevant hypo sensory/emotional issues. Though I am open to the idea of 'autisms' rather than a singular diagnosis, this makes it feel like a niche description in a time where there is a lack of evidence.

The one thing I like about the theory is that it doesn't revolve around deficits, as all the others do.

Hypersensitivity is considered a deficit in intense world hypothesis, and the intervention goal according to the researchers is to get rid of this deficit while keeping any special skills linked to it, which seems contradictory and impossible.

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" provides an illustration of how sensory overload could affect people with autism.

When the 15 year old protagonist arrived within the bright lights of London, he experienced the world as "intense." So intense that he underwent sensory overload. The outer world seemed intense to him.

I believe it will be concluded that there are, indeed, "autisms."