How to cope with sensory overload ?

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This is very hard to explain, mainly because the very ability to create these rules and stimming techniques are subject to the very principles which they create.

Sometimes it can be hard and sometimes it happens almost as a reflex.

The boy in The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time proberley created this 'can not lie' rule so easily that he doesn't even think he made it and inforced it on himself; he think Aspergers stops him from lying.

It always made me wonder that if someone could kill by the power of thought, what would stop them killing people accidently? Thoughts tend to run wild without a lot of self-dicipline, but many Aspie adults develop that quite often.

I once believed that I knew everything. It turned out that I didn't actually know everything; I was just working things out so fast and so easily that I thought I was recalling it from memory. My ego swelled as I declared myself the brainiest person in the universe. Then a 12 year-old beat me at Connect 4.

To try and answer your question directly: I BOTH do this 'mind-management' naturally AND by design.

It's quite circular the way it works: I was a Picture Thinker as a child, as I grew older I made my own means of using Picture Thought to think. I am naturally a Picture Thinker and I use Picture Thought to design more Picture Thought and it becomes both artificial and organic, but I can't differentiate between what was there in the beginning and what I made since.

I have grown a tree and used wood from it to make another tree(this is a metaphor).

By logic, this would mean that this 'rule-making' is a basic and instinctive occurance in Autistics.

I think... I'm confused.

What is "White Noise"? Is that like the sound of silence?

'White Noise' is noise being made in such a way that it has the same effect of silence.

If you sit in a silent room and try to listen to the silence, you will get a ringing in your ear. This is your brain making up for the afact that you are applying a disproportionate amount of attention to insufficient stimuli; it fills in the gapy with this non-existent sound. This sound is white noise.

If you are on a ferry or a cruise ship, you can always faintly hear the engine from your room and you will not experience this ringing. This is why it's actually quite easy to fall asleep on those ships. White noise can be static from a speaker, rustling leaves in the wind and most forms of low-key random sound. White Noise is sound that can easily be intergrated and accustomed to. A rattle being shaken with gaps in between is not white noise, but if it's shaken constantly and consistently it is white noise.

I have the dog in the kitchen right now wanting to come out and the tv in theback ground. Together the noise they make, if I try to consider them as the same sound instead of two different sources of sound, make white noise and I can tolerate both.

I'll let the dog in now.

For some reason this just made me crack up!
OK, back to your regularly scheduled programming.......

Get a walkman and find a tape/CD/CP3 of "pink noise" that you can play just loud enough to obscure the ambient sounds. You can also buy white noise machines for city apartments to mask some of the city sounds.

If your ears are ringing (i.e. a defined pitch) then it's tinnitus, which represents damage to the inner ear. White noise is a waveform made up of equal amounts of every frequency between 20Hz and 20kHz. It sounds like a hiss or a constant wave breaking on the beach.

No, mine when I hear silence, and its not all the time, is just a constant tone, not waves. What the heck is "pink noise"?

White noise contains all frequencies in equal proportion, but pitch is logarithmic so an upper octave will be orders of magnitude louder than low octaves. This means that the bass tones are under-represented and the noise has a generally high pitch. Pink noise is generated by logarithmically attenuating the input amplitude as the frequency is increased so that each octave is equally represented in the final noise regardless of how many frequencies are contained by that octave. Whereas white noise is perceived as a "hiss", pink noise is more of a "whoosh".

I find that white noise masks outside sound fairly well but isn't overwhelming. It's handy if you want to hide from the world and do some work (or sleep). Pink noise has a more audible distribution of sound so it demands attention and tends to be overwhelming at a much lower volume level. It's more suited to a long, boring commute on public transit.

mmm ive heard of so many aspies being super sensitive to everything but i guess im lucky! the only thing that seems to stand me out from NT's is that my hearing, touch and maybe sight are a bit more sensitive. hearing wise, i was the only person to jump out of my seat when they were testing the fire alarms at my college. touch wise, when it goes from say hot to cold and back, i shiver and i dont like sudden change like that - im more sensitive to cold more than other people - HEY maybe thats because ive lived in the tropics since i was 1yrs old!! oh well
sightwise, ive never needed glasses, but i think the only visual sensitivity thing that i have is that yes, i seem to look at EVERything at once - but this doenst make me sick or anything - it just seems my line of sight is always as wide as a moviescreen all the time, until i choose to focus on something. the only thing that annoys me sightwise is a shopping centre here with white tiles that have black borders round each white tile. the tiles seem to be like everywhere in my sight and occasionally rise around me.. when i was psychotic tho, i saw all these flashy light thting and all other werid stuff. luckily im on seroquel now!! seroquel is DA BOMB its the best thing ever to happen to me!!