Listening to Our Senses
by guest author M. L. N. Birdwell on January 25, 2022
I think we all understand that our senses don’t exactly line up with other people’s. Take for example, our experience of color—you’ve likely seen the charts that show the many different kinds of colorblindness. Or perhaps you’ve walked through a thought experiment showing that you cannot truly know if what you mean when you say “red” lines up with anyone else. In fact, most of us have talked to an artist who can wax rhapsodic about the joy they get from a particular shade or combination of hues, as well as someone who is simply not impacted.
These differences in color sense are just a part of natural variation. Luckily, we’ve arranged our stoplights so that they don’t impact people’s ability to drive, so this variety isn’t disabling. After all, color doesn’t exist in the world—electromagnetic waves exist, and all color is simply the way that individual brains translate those waves into information. What matters is making it work for people.
It’s important to remember, though, that the way we distinguish color isn’t the only way that our senses differ. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, proprioception—they can all vary significantly, leading to a useful diversity of experiences. It’s probably okay that most people cannot distinguish between every flavor in a curry or cake, but human experience is richer because someone can, and can fine tune recipes accordingly. In the end, we can acknowledge that our sensory experiences are unique to each one of us, and that this is a good thing.
These variations are especially notable in neurodivergent people. In fact, hypersensitivity and hyposensitivity are defining traits of autism. So, it’s clearly the case that we can’t trust our own senses to be a judge of how something feels for one of our autistic students and friends. Logically, we have to let them tell us, in one way or another, how the world feels to them, because we have no way to know.
Sadly, many people who work with autistic children know this intellectually, but don’t really apply the insight. They forget that their senses are not reliable indicators of what causes pleasure or pain, even agony. And when their charges try to communicate their experiences in some way, it’s dismissed as bad behavior or simply inconvenience. All too often, autistic people are told that they need to change the way that their senses work—an impossible task. The end result is that they are simply expected to exist in agony.
No one would be expected to focus in 100 decibel noise or strobe lights. No one would be expected to work with coarse sandpaper coating the surface of their tools, scraping away their skin. No one would expect a child to endure being cut open or punched silently and calmly as part of their daily routine. We can all agree that there is a level of background pain that is unacceptable, even abusive. We all know this.
But many approaches to education or therapy for neurodivergent people are unwilling to acknowledge what we know. They refuse to allow someone to say, “This hurts me, please let me stop.” They push therapists and educators to ignore their charges’ attempts to communicate about their senses, and mandate punishment for limiting agony and reward for leaning into it. ABA is a well-known example, but any modality or framework that invalidates people’s experience is a problem.
As educators, as parents, as friends, we have to do better than this. We need to leave those systems behind. We have to acknowledge that everyone is the only expert on their own experience. And when someone tries to communicate that they are in pain, we need to take it seriously. As someone who has spent most of their life “managing” anything but the most disabling levels of sensory input, I can promise that there are long-term consequences to health and well-being, functionality and success, if we don’t listen.
