Meanwhile, words may be fun but conversation and speech isn’t. But ‘unfiltered’ direct light sort of ‘needles’ its way into autistic peoples’ eyeballs.” Like Mitchell’s son, Naoki flaps his fingers in front of his eyes because “light that reaches us like this feels soft and gentle, like moonlight. And his sense of the past is as fragments or individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which will leap out and feel as fresh as the moment he experienced them - the shock of which can be extremely distressing. He can’t tell whether something just happened or whether it occurred days or weeks ago. He doesn’t experience life as a linear progression of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Naoki’s very sense of time and space differs from non-autistic people’s. “It’s like my limbs are a mermaid’s rubbery tail.” “I have no clear sensation of where my arms and legs are attached or how to make them do what I’m telling them to do,” he says. The connection between his brain and mouth is a constant source of upset, as is his sense of alienation from his body.
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