This is the seventh post in my autism awareness month series.
Last week, in a shop, the music felt loud. It wasn't painful to my ears at all. But it felt like a violation of my mind, occupying space I needed for thinking. I couldn't form a coherent thought. Part of me wanted to scream for it to stop. Instead I chose to step outside.
That's not a metaphor. That's what happened.
Here's why. Neurotypical auditory processing includes an automatic attention filter, the brain selects what to process and suppresses the rest. It's why you can follow one conversation in a noisy room, why background music stays in the background. The cocktail party effect. The filter runs without effort or awareness.
The autistic brain doesn't apply this filter the same way. Everything comes in at full processing weight. Not louder, just unfiltered. My wife could sit in the same shop and simply not notice the music after a few minutes. Not because she was trying to ignore it. Because her brain filed it as background and moved on. Mine didn't.
This is why "just ignore it" doesn't work as advice. You can't consciously override a central processing response. The sensation isn't at the ear, it's downstream, in what the brain does with the signal. Earplugs help with some sounds but not others, because the problem isn't always volume. Loop earplugs, which I've tried, turned the music into a muffled ASMR mess, a different problem, not a solution.
The whispering from the previous post fits here too. When I asked my family to speak more quietly, they whispered. That made it worse, because whispering is harder to pay attention to, not easier. The problem wasn't loudness, it was simultaneous signals at full weight, and whispering added effort on top of the load.
And it's not just sound. The same mechanism applies to any sensory input: touch, light, heat, and less obviously, physical discomfort from hunger, illness, or food sensitivities. My son finds heat the most unbearable. Not because his body overheats differently, but because the thermal signal competes for processing at the same weight as everything else. Once, as a child, he was outside upset because he was hot. My wife told him to get out of the sun. He kept saying he was hot. Moving wouldn't have helped immediately, the signal was already inside, already being processed. The brain doesn't flush on command.
The same logic applies to diet. Removing dairy helped my son noticeably, not because dairy causes autism, but because a food sensitivity generates internal signals that an unfiltered system has to process. Managing unnecessary inputs is load management, removing them helps with sensory overload. The wiring stays the same. You're just giving it less to handle.
Next: when the brain won't comply.
This is part of my April 2026 autism awareness month series. First published on LinkedIn on 2026-04-15.
